A common service that design agencies offer their clients is the creation of brand guidelines. Lingo can make the process of creating, sharing, updating and using these guidelines easier and faster so we wanted to share some of the ways existing agency customers have found success using Lingo.

The problem

When we talk to design agencies they usually have two options for creating brand guidelines for their clients.

They can either create a static PDF brand guideline, or create a bespoke digital brand guideline. Both of these options present their own problems. The PDF guidelines are easy to create but since they’re only static PDFs they’re not easy to use. For example you can’t download a font or a logo from the PDF, and copying a color value from it to use elsewhere is usually a pain. Need to make an update to the guideline? Whether the change is big or small, now you need to make a new version of the PDF and make sure everyone has the most up to date one!

Living digital brand guidelines are easy to use and keep up to date, but they can be very costly to make. They are resource intensive, time consuming and expensive to build and maintain — especially if you’re a smaller agency.

The Solution

Building your client’s digital brand guidelines with Lingo solves these problems. It’s easy, fast and affordable, and the end result is a centralized set of living brand guidelines that are easy to update and intuitive for your clients to use.

If you do use Lingo to build your client’s brand guidelines, you’ll need to decide how you want to “hand it off” to your client. I’ll go over two options that we’ve seen customers use.

A Kit for every client

In this setup your agency would manage a single Lingo workspace. Inside your Lingo workspace each client would have it’s own Kit (in Lingo you can think of Kits as asset libraries).

To share your brand guideline with your client you would generate a public or password protected kit link and send it to them. Your client would then be able to access and use that kit on the web. Your client would NOT have access to any of the other Kits in your workspace.

A Workspace for every client

In this setup you would create a unique workspace for each of your clients. You would then assemble your clients’ Kits in their respective workspaces. Your agency’s team members can switch between different client workspaces with ease, this is because a Lingo account can be joined to more than one workspace.

To share your client’s brand guidelines using this setup you could either share a link to a kit or you could invite your clients to their respective workspace. You could even transfer ownership of the workspace to your client after your engagement is complete.

Which setup is best?

The setup that is going to be best for you is really based on how you like to work and your client’s needs. Below are the pros and cons of each configuration.

A Kit for every client

Pros

Easy mental model — each client has it’s own kit
Less overhead — you only have to invite your agency team members to a single Lingo workspace
Less expensive — you only have to pay for one workspace.

Cons

If you need to share multiple kits with your client then you’ll need to share multiple links. This is not a huge problem, but it is an inconvenience.
Your clients Kits won’t look custom branded. In Lingo you can customize the color of the UI, control which logo appears as the workspace avatar and even set a custom subdomain. All of this functionality is applied at the space level though, and since you could have work from multiple client’s in a single workspace you won’t be able to apply a unique theme to each of their Kits.
Transferring ownership of the brand guideline is not as streamlined. Once your clients receive their brand guideline they may want to manage it themselves. If this is the case they will need to create their own Lingo workspace and you’ll need to reach out to our team so we can transfer the kit from your workspace to theirs.

A Workspace for every client

Pros

Each client’s workspace can be custom themed so it looks more professional and on-brand.
If your client’s brand guidelines need to be spread across multiple kits, you could share all the kits with a single link using Lingo’s Brand Portal functionality.
Transferring ownership of the workspace to your client is easy. All you need to do is invite them to their workspace and then make them the owner.

Cons

More overhead — Setting up and doing user management across multiple workspaces is more tedious and complex.
More expensive

Of course you could use a combination of these configurations if needed. Let’s say you have a smaller client, you may want to just create a single kit in your workspace for their brand guideline. But then you have another client who who has a more complex brand guideline, you may want to create a unique workspace to house their assets.

If you have any questions about these configurations of if you’d like to learn more about Lingo feel free to reach out to info@lingoapp.com and we’ll be sure to get in touch!