Hello! I hope everyone is having a good day. I’m researching about branding and documentation right now, and could use some help on figuring out cohesion with these two topics. Currently I’m struggling to find an example of documentation that seamlessly integrates the brand, while not taking up too much room / sacrificing their content’s quality. This would be for technical binders and business plans.
Here’s some additional information that might be useful
We’re looking to use an online and collaborative software; such as Figma.
Mascots?
Minimal design pages that don’t add content value
Examples of documents include technical binders, business plans, financials, promotional materials, and flyers.
Thanks!
EDIT: I also want to emphasize that I’m personally well versed in branding guidelines, and content writing for business documents. This post is mostly to look at what everyone else is doing and how we can put our own spin on it. Sorry if this was not clear.
This wouldn’t be the use case of firms. You would be wanting Canva, or Adobe products. (Indesign for flyers/print, illustrator/photoshop for graphics/logos, premiere for videos.)
As for branding guidelines, if you check out FIRST’s branding guideline you can see an example for setting up branding guidelines. You can get away with a little less in-depth, but include cmyk/rgb/hex breakdown of team colors for consistency, and fonts to set up a standard.
Can help when hanging down to one another/designing new content.
You can choose a few ways to always incorporate the brand. Make a button bumper with the logo on it or have a watermark. (A common practice is having an area you constantly put the logo, and possibly adjust content to leave a safe space everytime.)
I’ve consistently used Canva since 2018-2019, and the software is not up to my liking as of recently. It doesn’t actually center/position elements correctly, major documents can overclock space especially on Chrome, and more (to be fair, this could be just my computer, but several others I’ve used overclock easily and I don’t want to rely on having “good computers” to run it.) Not to mention it’s hard to discern from the free and paid content. With my previous FRC teams, we’ve applied for their nonprofit license and have been denied for 3+ years, so I want to also become familiar with other software.
Furthermore, I’m not sure if we have access to Adobe for the season, so I want to prioritize accessibility and collaboration, and expand from there. If we do, then that’s a priority.
EDIT: For those who say don’t use Google Chrome, some school systems don’t allow other software to be used. This is to make sure that students can access it.
I’m mostly looking for how documents look over the content right now. I’ve worked on several branding guidelines and business plans to help guide content along, it’s just how it looks. I’ve seen many documents that may not be useful or easy to read cause they focus more on the brand. Just looking for some cohesion and simplicity.
Here are our copies of some of our supporting documentation. We’ve won both Imagery and several technical awards in the past two years, so I’d like to think we’re doing something right.
We use Canva and it absolutely has its annoying quirks, but the simplicity for making visually appealing content without tons of effort is a plus, alongside with collaborative features.
Canva pro features are available for free with an educator account, which can then be shared with “students”, which we have our team account as.
Thank you!
Canva hasn’t been up to my liking recently (as described above). It’s a great software for collaboration. If they fix it / make it more accessible, I’d be using it no problem.
My previous teams didn’t have access to the educator accounts because they didn’t belong to a school, and that seemed to be the hang-up on it. I’ll take a look and see if it’ll be different with this team.
We provide graphics every once in a while when neccesary to prove a point or explain a statistic, but otherwise the main graphics is just the title page we get Graphics to make each year. Besides that its just font, coloring, spacing and other things which we try and hold standard between all of the documents.
I feel like media, branding, and graphic design is a less developed side of FRC, so there are two ways to approach it:
Use basic websites that anyone could learn how to use easily (Canva, Slides, etc)
Use common softwares in the industry (Adobe’s Creative Cloud, Figma, Affinity)
In my team, I prefer the second option - just like the software team won’t use Scratch (or LabView) and mechanics wont use TinkerCAD, I believe that the media team should be no exception and use the products that are being used in the industry.
Adobe has great collaborative features - not as great as figma, but still usually enough.
If you believe that jumping into Adobe is tough, I’d recommend trying Affinity / Figma.
Affinity is an Adobe clone but much cheaper. I am not sure about its integration and collaborative features but worth checking out. Figma is another great option being used mainly for UI UX but can also serve as a great platform for FRC. Their collaborative features are just like Google Docs, which I believe is what you’re looking for.
Figma’s use case is mostly web/UI/screen design. Fine if you’re designing a team’s website from scratch or using their whiteboard like features to brainstorm, but I wouldn’t use it for print.
I’m glad you brought up Affinity, though, the cost is much more reasonable than Adobe (though a school hosting a team may already be footing the bill for that).
I have seen people use it for designing posts and more, it is really usable for designing digitaly. If talking about printing, yeah I guess it is less common for that (didn’t think about that aspect when writing the comment).