Lindsay Stuart • Nov 19th, 2019
From logos to fonts, color palettes and illustrations, documenting your brand identity helps ensure consistency no matter where your brand appears. In this series, we’re featuring some of the best brand style guides from companies in our community.
TaskRabbit is a task management network that helps provide relief for people overwhelmed by their to-do lists. The service connects people with reliable Taskers, highly-skilled people in your neighborhood that can help you with whatever you need, whether that’s assembling furniture, hanging up shelves, moving to a new home, or helping run errands. With a mission to make life easier for everyday people, trust and relationships are the cornerstone of the company, and TaskRabbit has built a brand that embodies these values and communicates the company’s energetic, helpful personality through a distinct visual identity.
The TaskRabbit brand style guide lives in Lingo and is packed full of valuable information to help ensure brand consistency and increase efficiency for anyone working on TaskRabbit branded materials. The guide is used by the entire TaskRabbit company, including global offices, contractors and partners.
It begins with a helpful Brand Basics section. Senior Designer, Brand & Product at TaskRabbit Maria Gorre says that when building the company’s brand style guide, “We started with our brand basics: our mission, vision and characteristics, as these are the foundation towards building a great brand and maintaining consistency. Since this brand guide is for our entire company, we wanted one central place anyone could visit and remember who we are and why we do what we do.”
Prior to using Lingo, TaskRabbit’s brand style guide assets were located in a traditional cloud storage solution that used a folder system, but it was often hard to find and make changes to the material and keep it updated. It was also complicated to grant the right people the correct permissions to access the assets they needed. With Lingo, the TaskRabbit brand style guide lives in one place and can easily be accessed by any team member, anywhere.
Next, the guide showcases the brand’s logo and wordmark, which serve as TaskRabbit’s visual voice. Clean and simple, the rabbit logo is a nod to where the company started and how far they’ve come. In addition to providing logo and wordmark examples, sizing and spacing guides are also included to ensure these brand elements are used correctly.
TaskRabbit’s visual language is friendly, warm, and human. It’s a people-based business, so they strive to make sure their visuals are natural and relatable.
Another element of a great style guide is using images that show proper use, along with contextual information to help clarify best practices. TaskRabbit has included a set of “Do’s and Don’ts” to ensure anyone using their brand assets has consistent information to guide creation.
Colors are a commonly used brand asset and documenting your brand’s colors, along with where and when each color should be used is an important part of a style guide.
TaskRabbit is synonymous with green, which is the brand’s primary color. Blue is secondary, and yellow is tertiary, with these supporting colors adding playful touches to the TaskRabbit color family. There is contextual information included throughout this section of the style guide to ensure all colors are used properly, complete with HEX, CMYK and PMS color values.
Fonts are also included and available for download, complete with important notes that indicate how, and when, these fonts should be used.
This is a unique section that not every brand chooses to include in their style guide. By including a section on Voice and Tone, TaskRabbit is ensuring anyone writing copy has a strong set of guidelines to follow, which helps keep the brand’s voice consistent across channels.
“We interact with our Clients and Taskers across many different touchpoints, whether that’s through our product, customer support, emails, marketing campaigns, etc. It’s important for us to know that no matter who they may be interacting with or where they live, our Clients and Taskers feel they are speaking to one company,” said Maria. “Having guidelines around voice and tone makes it that much easier for everyone in our company to sound and speak like TaskRabbit.”
TaskRabbit has also created a separate section to house their asset library, which serves as the brand’s one-stop shop for downloading any assets that might be needed, including the most up-to-date logo files for online and print use, font files, color values, a photo library, illustration library, and even a presentation template. This is extremely convenient, so instead of having to navigate through individual sections of the style guide to find each asset they need, users can go straight to the asset library for downloads.
Thanks to TaskRabbit and Maria for sharing with us!
About TaskRabbit
Founded in 2008, TaskRabbit is a leading task management network that conveniently connects people with Taskers to handle everyday home to-do’s, such as furniture assembly, handyman work, moving help, and much more. Acquired by IKEA group in 2017, TaskRabbit operates in more than 50 markets across the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Canada, and is headquartered in San Francisco.