Edward Boatman • May 15th, 2024
Brand guidelines have always been crucial for creative teams looking to build a strong brand. Now, by transitioning these guidelines from static PDFs to dynamic digital brand hubs, their value has significantly increased. These online platforms assist creative teams in enhancing brand awareness and maintaining consistency. They also empower everyone, including non designers to create on their own.
If you're an in-house brand designer or creative director looking to establish a central home for your brand, or an agency designer tasked with developing digital brand hubs for your clients, the below list of features and capabilities will serve as a helpful way to evaluate and choose a digital brand guidelines platform.
You’ll want to start your evaluation by getting a good understanding of the overall architecture of the platform and make sure it’s going to fit your needs. Some things you’ll want to consider are:
Managing multiple brands is of course important if you have a “house of brands” or a “family of brands” type of brand architecture. This is also important if you’re a brand agency and you’re creating brand guidelines for each of your clients.
In a single Lingo instance or “workspace”, you can create an unlimited number of kits. Kits are like a container for your assets and documentation. For example, a customer might create a “Brand guidelines” kit, a “Photo library” kit and a “Partners” kit. Each kit can contain it’s own content and can be shared independently.
We also have the ability to create an unlimited number of Portals. Portals are like landing pages for your brand. You can place multiple kits in a portal and then share all the content contained in the portal with a single link. Here is an example of a portal reddit.lingoapp.com.
Being able to create an unlimited number of kits and portals from a single instance gives you the flexibility needed to organize and distribute your content in a way that best suits your needs.
You’ll want to make sure the brand guidelines platform you choose gives you the ability to store and manage the assets that are documented in your guideline. Put differently, can you upload and manage assets directly in the platform? Can you combine Content and Context in a single location? Without this, you’ll need to use multiple platforms, one for building your guideline, and the other for storing and managing the assets that are documented in the guideline. This fragmentation creates inefficiencies, and can increase cost.
You’ll also want to make sure the platform you choose can accept all the file types that are used to represent and form your brand. Typically this includes: vector files, photos, colors, videos, templates and many other file types.
In Lingo we seamlessly bring together digital asset management and digital brand guidelines into a single platform. You can upload all the assets and digital libraries that are contained in your guideline directly to our platform. Furthermore we have an entire layer of the product dedicated to asset management called the Library. The Library allows you to manage your assets and the meta data attached to them, in a single easy to use location.
This is very important functionality - how do I customize the content in my guideline, so it looks great and it’s easy for others to understand and use? Also, what’s the UX of the guideline builder, and how easy is it for admins to use?
In Lingo, we’ve worked hard to create what we think is the right balance between customization and ease of use. In Lingo, your assets and documentation can be organized inside kits. Kits are like a flexible canvas that bring together the functionality of a document and an asset library into a single product. Kits have a WYSIWYG type of interface that includes an insert panel containing different content blocks that can be dragged and dropped on the kit canvas. It has a very familiar page builder like user experience.
This flexibility allows customers to document and define every aspect of their brand in a single product module. Kits can be used to house brand guidelines, photo libraries, video libraries, Press kits, and any other type of asset library you can imagine.
Below are some examples of kits housing different types of content.
Kit as a brand guideline
Kit as a photo library
You’ll want your digital brand guideline to be a reflection of your brand, so of course you’re going to want to make it look and feel on brand. This is done by customizing different elements of your digital brand guideline to make them adhere to your brand standards.
In Lingo you can customize the following elements:
Accent color - change the primary color used throughout the product in locations like the UI and hyperlinks.
Fonts - change Lingo’s system font to a font of your choosing. This will change the font used throughout the product.
Avatar - upload a custom avatar that will display in the header navigation when viewing a kit.
Portal header - upload a custom image that will display as a header on your portal homepage.
Themes - choose between three different themes that alter the look and feel of your portal homepage and in kit view.
How will team members and outside partners navigate to your digital brand guideline? Will they first have to spend time finding the link to it, or is the link memorable enough to commit to their memory so they can effortlessly access it at a moments notice? A vanity URL in the form of a custom sub domain or custom domain can ensure the link to your brand hub is recognizable enough to commit to their memory. It also makes your digital brand hub look and feel official to everyone accessing it.
In Lingo you can create a custom domain or subdomain. Examples of each are below.
Custom subdomain - reddit.lingoapp.com
Custom domain - brand.denison.edu
Once you create your digital brand guideline or digital brand hub you’ll want to make sure people can access it. How do you want to achieve this, do you want to keep the guideline private and use an authentication system like SSO to ensure just the members of your organization can access it? Or, do you want to truly make your guideline public so anyone can access it including internal and external partners. Maybe there are parts of your brand hub you want to keep private and other parts that you want to make public.
It’s important for the platform you choose to have a variety of access and publishing settings to accommodate for your unique needs. In Lingo, each kit can have it’s own access setting. A kit can either be private (only members of your workspace can access) or they can be public (anyone with the link can access). If the kit is public, added layers of security can be added by requiring a password or by using a feature called download requests that provides you the ability to approve or deny individual asset downloads.
A common request that creative teams receive is “can you convert this file for me?” or “can you resize this image for me?” The digital brand guideline solution you choose should eliminate these requests by empowering the people using the guideline to find the file they need, in the format and size they need, all without needing your help.
Lingo has robust image processing capabilities and because of this, we can automatically convert files for you, saving you and your team huge amount of time. For example, if you upload a logo file to Lingo in SVG format, we automatically convert the file into a PDF, EPS and PNG formats. Furthermore, a user can resize the logo before downloading it.
Once your digital brand hub is published and people are using it, you may want to know the answers to basic questions like - How many people are viewing my digital brand guideline? Who are these people and what assets are they downloading?
Lingo has a built in analytics hub called Insights. In the Insights tab you’ll be able to see how many assets are being downloaded, how many online views your kits and portals are receiving. You’ll also be able to go more granular and see what assets are being downloaded and who exactly is downloading them.