Edward Boatman • Jan 26th, 2024
Denison University faced a challenge in centralizing and distributing their brand guidelines, digital assets, and messaging framework after a recent brand refresh. The creative team at Denison solved this by using Lingo to create a public brand portal reducing asset requests and increasing overall brand usage. The brand portal can be accessed here.
Denison University, founded in 1831 is a fully residential liberal arts college located in Granville, Ohio. Denison delivers a life-shaping education and launches graduates quickly and successfully into lives and careers.
Denison University had just gone through a brand refresh and now their creative team was in possession of valuable pdf brand guidelines, digital assets like logos and photos, and a strategic messaging framework. However the creative team was struggling to find a way to centralize all this content and make it easily accessible to the people who needed to use it the most. After all what good were the guidelines if no one actually used them?
The creative team at Denison, lead by Mark Pinkerton, knew there must be a way to centralize their entire brand system and make it easy to access and use, so he started to look for digital brand guideline solutions and quickly discovered Lingo - an easy to use brand management platform.
Mark scheduled a demo with the Lingo team and quickly determined Lingo would be a great fit. It was an affordable option compared to other expensive solutions and allowed his team to do the following:
Once Lingo was identified as a potential solution Mark and his team took advantage of Lingo’s completely free 30 day trial. This was a great way for his team to truly test the platform and confirm it would meet their needs before making a purchase.
During the trial Mark and his team started to organize all their brand information inside Lingo. They decided to create different Lingo kits to help separate their content and make it easy to understand and navigate.
Inside each kit, Mark and his team were able to use Lingo’s intuitive no code kit builder to quickly document every asset and aspect of their brand. For example, in the Denison’s Logos kit there is a section containing information about their logo’s heritage and guidelines on how it should be used. This contextual information is displayed directly next to the downloadable logo files ensuring the logos are used correctly.
Downloading the logo files from Lingo is valuable not just because the files are next to contextual information, but also because Lingo provides automatic file conversion and resizing capabilities. This means the end user can find the file they’re looking for, in the right format and size all without needing to contact the creative team.
The Denison team also wanted to use Lingo to distribute a library of pre-approved photos. To do this, they created a unique Photography kit that contained information about their photography standards and then divided their photos into different sections based on theme. Because of Lingo’s built in AI enhanced search functionality, the photo library is instantly searchable based on the contents of a photo. For example a search for“Tree” will return photos containing a tree.
Once the Denison brand system was fully documented in Lingo it was time to start thinking about how to distribute the content to all the necessary groups. One of the first steps the Denison team took was to make sure their brand hub looked on-brand and official for anyone that was accessing it. To do this, Denison used Lingo’s custom theming to apply a custom accent color and font, and also worked with the Lingo team to setup a custom domain for the brand portal - brand.denison.edu
With the theming applied it was now ready for the rollout - each kit that was placed in the brand portal was made public so people without Lingo accounts could access them. The kit that contained the Denison logos had a special access setting called “download requests” turned on. This forces visitors to the kit to provide their email address when they attempt to download an asset. The Denison team can then review each request and approve or deny it. This ensures only the correct people are using the logos which helps protect their brand.
With the Denison brand portal now accessible to all faculty, students, outside partners and the general public, the Denison creative team are fielding less asset requests and seeing an increase in usage of their brand.