How does your team maintain a distinct brand?

[cadandcookies]

I've noticed that some teams (254 in particular) have either publicly released or seem to have some sort of consistent design elements across all media that they release. By this I mean things like 254's team branding guidelines, or even more informal things like team 1816 Green Machine's gear eyes. I'm curious as to how other teams, including 254, have come up with and maintained their logo, team colors, and other design elements throughout the years. I'm also curious as to whether other teams have developed a "branding guide" like 254's, whether internal or public, and how they arrived at the elements that constitute that "brand."

As an aside, my team has been looking at creating a guidebook to our team's "design elements" in order to help streamline the creation of promotional media , t-shirts, poster, and other items. We (or at least a segment of the team) think that arriving at some sort of consensus as to what constitutes our team "brand" will help us present a more professional and consistent face in all of our activities.

[nighterfighter]

One tip: Don't be like 1771, we changed our name every year.

Consistency is key.

[cadandcookies]

Originally Posted by nighterfighter

One tip: Don't be like 1771, we changed our name every year.

Consistency is key.

Well, we haven't had many issues on that front-- it's been Blue Twilight since the beginning. The main changes have been colors-- we went from white and sky blue to black and cyan to royal blue and white over the course of our first three years. Some of our media is still back in the "black and cyan" days. Heck, some of the more recent stuff is created with the "black and cyan" color scheme, to no end of chagrin to some members of the team.

[Peyton Yeung]

Our team has been around every single year and we still have problems with branding. This year we are trying to focus on using the same logo and we are trying to integrate previous designs for continuity.

Peyton

[holygrail]

If it's a fun theme that both the students and the mentors can really get into, they'll want to stick with it year after year and build fun traditions. Our team (which has a Monty Python and the Holy Grail theme, as a play on our school's mascot, the Knights) presents a marketing/branding workshop each year with a lot of good tips. The power point from the workshop can be found on our website, under resources: http://firstteam1939.com/wp-content/...iSpirit121.pdf

Good luck!

[Phyrxes]

Our team has also struggled with branding, while most of the designs were students driven the design elements had lost their focus over the years. So this fall we reached out to a local marketing company and they were kind enough to come in and go over all of our existing documentation and make suggestions as to what was good and what wasn't. The students really responded and have spent the last few months working to overhaul all of our branding, the first suggestion that was made was decide on fonts/colors and above all else be consistent in their usage.

[cadandcookies]

Thank you for all the info!

It's nice to know that we aren't the only teams who have been struggling with branding issues.

[dcarr]

We have a fairly basic Branding guide on our website here:

http://team3309.org/branding

Mostly it encompasses visual representations like the video bumper and logo variations.

It's changed over the last few years, however; we started with just the FB logo, then added the variation with the 'Friarbots' arc underneath, then added the two 3309 logos this year (with the same visual theme) because we realized that including our team logo was most important in context of FIRST.

[James1902]

Hello,
Bacon has done a workshop at the championship event focused on branding and marketing for the past two years. We have video and an accompanying slide show accessible through our Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/explodingbacon1902 (it's the tab titled 'The Big Bacon Theory of Image and Marketing')

We have guidelines when dealing with our image and our marketing materials, and we have carried that through our promotional materials. (found at www.cafepress.com/explodingbaconrobotics)

I would agree with a set of guidelines for using your logo. It's apart of your team brand and should be as consistent as possible