How To Build a Consistent Brand

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Hey everyone, we’re gonna give everyone a few seconds to get in and get ready and we’ll get started.

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Stop some people coming in. So wait a few more seconds. And when I see that number stopping I’ll jump right in

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so people joining us in a few minutes, but we’ll we’ll get going. Thank you all so much for being here today, I’m really excited to talk to you all about color typography and brand assets for nonprofits. I’d like to start out and introduce myself a little bit, I did want to share that I will be asking you all some questions today. So I know, you know, sometimes these are more just talk to you and you listen, but I’m hoping today that we can work together a little bit. And I find webinars are a little more exciting when there is some engagement. So I’ll be sharing a little bit on how to have you all get involved. But thank you so much for being here. All right, and here I am. Hello, I’m Abbi, Guido. And as I said, Here, I’m here to share my design knowledge a little bit about myself and why you should trust me today. I am a assistant professor of graphic and interactive design at Tyler School of Art and Architecture. That’s part of Temple University. So that is is part of my full time work. I also have a design studio called Abby Ryan design, where I myself work with different nonprofits. Most recently, I worked with research for action, consulting with them as they rebranded. So I am in this world with you all. And I have a lot of experience working with all sizes of nonprofits up to working on a big rebranding effort for the ACLU, back in the thinking may have been 2001. So I’ve spent a long time in this field working with different folks. And I understand some of the struggles of smaller nonprofits and needs that have to be met, internally branding wise, and I’m hoping today that I can give you all some skills that you can apply and help improve your brand. So we’re going to cover three different areas. Today, we’re going to be talking about how to establish a successful color palette. And you know, color is a really fun thing, because part of color is just we all are attracted to different colors for different reasons. And it’s kind of exciting to dig into that a little bit and try to figure out why. And then we’ll also pair that with what is best for the organization. And so we’ll get into that a little bit. We’re going to dig into typographic hierarchy. This is somewhere where I think would probably be a bigger challenge for a lot of folks understanding typography. And that is really what we’re using mainly to communicate. And so understanding how to build a system that is able to work for you and communicate with your stakeholders what you need them to understand. And then finally weren’t talking about what could go into a brand Asset Library, I’m going to be sharing some tricks in order to keep your libraries consistent, and also sharing some places where you can find different assets that you could use possibly. Alright, so let’s jump right into color. And I like to joke a little bit that we start way, way back, my son is starting kindergarten. And I remember when my daughter did, she came home with a color wheel. So we’re going way back to color wheels. So it’s important to understand a little bit of color theory to really be able to make educated color decisions and so very far on the left hopefully everyone knows this. The primary colors right These are the colors that you can’t mix to make. These are the primary colors of the three pigments, yellow, red, and blue. And every other color is derived from these three hues. Sometimes we add some neutrals like black and whites, we add different amounts of these colors to make all the other colors, but every color is based on these three. Next, we’re gonna go into the secondary. And that’s where we add in the colors we get when we mix the primary. So the red and the yellow make the orange. And then the tertiary colors are mixing those secondary colors. So we’re mixing a primary and a secondary, we get the tertiary. And again, this is just, you know, an overall knowledge to be able to dig deeper into different color palettes, and different color schemes, which is where we’re going to be heading. Within color, it’s always important for anyone who’s managing a brand or creating to understand the mixing of colors, and the two different color mixing platforms, you usually hear the most about RGB and CMYK. This is just important to know. So that if someone’s asking you for an image that represents your nonprofit, or you have a vendor that needs something that you or you’re asking someone else for an image that you understand which type of colors you need. So RGB we only see on screen. So even when you print out a photo from let’s say, your phone that was taken in RGB, the printer converts that to CMYK. Because there is no way of actually printing RGB. RGB is an additive color process. And so it’s what’s produced by the light coming through the colors. And that’s why when we put all these colors together, we get white. So there’s no way of laying this down on a piece of paper. Because there isn’t the light coming through. CMYK is what most standard inkjet printers color laser printers are converting to in printing with cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. And this is a process of overlapping colors, right. And so we’re overlapping them. It’s a subtractive color process. And we’re using the light to reflect the paper. And so when you’re talking to someone about an asset, if you need it for the screen, you’re always going to need an RGB. And if you’re going to be printing, you want to use CMYK. And as much as possible, you want to be able to convert the images yourself to CMYK because you’re going to see more accurately on the screen what it will look like for print. And so that’s just something you might need to know if you are someone who’s working on printing materials. So I want to jump a little bit into the properties of colors and and some what colors mean. And you know, it’s kind of a fun thing because colors mean different things to different people. But in general, when we see colors, they do represent certain emotions. A big way of dividing up the colors are by saying these are all of our cool colors. And these are all of our warm colors. And that cool colors give an impression of calmness. And they’re soothing, and warm colors tend to be more vivid and more energetic and they also advance in space. And so we think about that advancing in space, when we start thinking about, what do we want to jump off of the screen or jump off of a page? And can I use a color that already does that that already advances in space? And so it’s nice to think about are using warm colors are using cool colors? And what are you using them for? So now this is where I’m going to see if I can get some of you involved in in some of these conversations around emotions. And we’re going to do this in a way that might seem a little confusing, but what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna use the Questions tab. So you all should have a questions box in your interface for this webinar. And we’re going to start with number one. And while it’s gonna seem like you’re typing a question, you’re actually gonna be typing the answer in there, but don’t worry about it. And what I want to do is want the initial reaction you have, we’re gonna start with number one, what do you motion does number one, give you what do you think about when you look at the color of the number one read? I’m gonna see some of these pop up, hopefully talk about them a little bit. So again, if you can look for your questions panel, and type in some answers here, does this red remind you of heat? Does it remind you is it cautionary? What is it? Excitement I see? Right? It has that vibrance to it. Anything else for this read? Awesome. Yes, festive. I love that. You know, we have both joy and fear. And so that’s really, really interesting to think about, right? So for some of us, this is fearful. It might it might have like, you know, kind of a warning feeling to it. And so it gives us that fear but also maybe joy because it has that energy I see energy I see heat and rage is a really great answers. And so it’s really fun to think about this. We’re going to move on to number two now and I want to work through all these and just kind of talk about how just slight variations in one color can say so many different things. So what about number two? Do you have any thoughts about number two?

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Same thing like what feelings and this one, you know, I see a little delay. Right? It’s a little more muted, so it might give us not that kind of automatic. This is what this is right? It might feel a little bit more calming. See if I get any. Oh, you know what I do have answered. I think I’ve just scroll down. There we go. All right. Awesome. Fall dark. Love courage. I love this conference. I love it. Someone said cooking, too, right? Because it’s funny. We’ll talk about the next page. Like there are certain colors that we relate with food. And I can I can see how that gets it. I love the fall earthy dirt right. So it has that more natural feel to it. All right. Now I know I know I have to scroll in this box so I can get all the answers I need. Let’s jump to number three

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so Pat said black. That’s great. But that’s like this intelligence and kind of steady like maybe this is something we can depend on in a way. We still have some kind of earthy comments. Cozy

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bricks for buildings, right? So sometimes we relate colors to an object, mud, pottery Earth those kind of connect together. Alright, and finally let’s go to for thank you all for for participating. This makes these so much more enjoyable for myself to get to see what you all are thinking

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so number four here we go. Flowers soft, cheerful. Man. Calm, fun, happy, almost pink. perky. Love. That was when I was kind of looking for right? Like, which color kind of gives that love? Is it the pink because we think Valentine’s Day cheerful, warm happiness. And so I would just remind you all as you’re thinking about talking about color with folks, sometimes it’s really helpful when you want to talk about your color decisions to connect some of these adjectives with that color, right? So I’m using this you know, sweet red, or I’m using this fall red this autumn red, right? Because it gives other folks that idea of why did you make this decision for this color in particular, and it’s a lot more descriptive than just like oh, use red. Alright, so now we’re giving some people some direction of what we want that color to say a lot of great answers here. And a great shade of lipstick. All right, let me jump back over here. I will be these slides as long as it’s okay. I’m okay with them being available for everyone. So you’ll get this here. And to be honest, this list I grabbed I just Googled color theory and got a list of some words that are used to describe different colors. And you’ll see from site to site, people feel differently again, just like you all had different feelings about these colors. Folks that read these lists do as well but it’s kind of nice to know that they’re out there that you can look up Why am I using a certain color and we’re going to look at a few logos quickly and talk a little bit more about that and hopefully you all will continue to participate because this is really really great to see as to why a company may a nonprofit may use certain colors in their in their branding. So I’m gonna jump right to that next slide and talk about that for a moment. Alright, so we’re gonna start a little with Feeding America. And what I’d love for you all to use this question box for now is to quickly just say maybe why you think they selected orange and green for their colors for this brand. I have some ideas myself. So we’re talking about this Feeding America we have this orange this kind of a little bit of an olive green. And I can even flip back really quickly. So you all can see a little bit of why of what some words that go along with these colors are and I’d love for you to chat to type in the question box maybe what you’re thinking as to why they selected those colors. I will go back again

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food colors big one right there’s certain colors that we just do not associate with food and when someone tries to use it in a in a logo for restaurant or food. Some colors really really fail miserably but farm Country right? So we have these earth tones. Correct. But I also like some of the comments. Let’s see, we have a lot of things about food. But what about emotion? Let me see if I have any here makes you think of the earth. Optimism. I love that one, right? Orange for affordability. Great. So these colors can mean so much more. And it’s it’s subconscious, you’re not going to see this logo and be like, Oh, Feeding America, they select those colors, because they’re optimistic about this problem. No, it does not that exact, but it does start to make you feel a certain way, which might influence you to help out to volunteer to donate. How about Habitat for Humanity?

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See, we have blue and green, which we see a lot in a lot of corporate logos. But why? Why was it used for Habitat for Humanity? Reliable and comfort, right. So that that reliable color that blue, you see a lot about trust, right. And this is a company and a nonprofit that people want to trust that, you know, all nonprofits you want to trust, but this one in particular. Go through. Safe, trustworthy, sturdy, dependable, again, like some of that earthy colors, looks active. I love this safe, wonderful. And then the last one is a rebrand, actually, that was done by a colleague of mine in a class at Tyler. They used to be called the career wardrobe. And now they are the wardrobe. And I know this was interesting, because this was different. This is purple and green, which might not always see as much. So what do we think? And for those, you know, I don’t know, everyone knows what they do. But they help provide services, but mostly clothes for folks that are getting back into the working industry for different reasons. So why do we think that the wardrobe is using this green and purple

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fashionable and sleek. I love that, right? So they don’t want to be you know, they’re not just giving any kind of thrifted clothes, they actually are getting really nice clothes and helping people feel proud to go in for an interview. And so that’s really important. This royal idea, I love that right. So that folks feel, you know, like they have the courage to to make these steps. Great for fashion. A modern feel, yeah, real classic. So so all these different words, I love that you all are putting this together, you know, we can look at one color and say oh, it means you know something different to me than it does to you. But when we combine that with these icons and with these words and look at these organizations do, we can figure out why they selected the color. And so that’s that’s an important step in understanding how to select the best colors. Right. So now we’re going to look at color schemes. And so it’s one thing to select colors that you’re going to use on your logos. And that can be challenging. But typically in a logo, we might have two colors, some logos, we have more colors, but usually one or two, and it’s a little bit easier to select. But we may not always want to use just those colors, you want to want to expand our color palette a little bit. And in order to understand how to do that, we want to understand a few color schemes. So color schemes are ways of combining different colors into a palette that work together well. analogous colors, and this is why I showed the color wheels before because in order to understand these schemes, we have to just understand a little bit of the color wheel. So an analogous color palette, or when we follow colors in a row on that color wheel, I think it’s important to mention as well as these color wheels are all at 100% saturation. But you can imagine there’s many shades and 10s of all these colors. So they might not always be this bold. But this is just for the slideshow. So now let’s come in a row on the color wheel. And the easy way of remembering that is that these are what we see in nature. So I was just at the beach last week, watch the sunset almost every night. And you see these beautiful now this color palettes where you see the reds and the blues and the greens and it’s all together. So we’re thinking about nature’s when we see these and because of that they have a really like pleasing field have a really calm feel to them. So they’re they’re really nice common color palettes. A complimentary is when we look at two colors on either spectrum, either end of the color wheel, so we can just turn these white lines around to do any kind of complementary colors. And so they’re an opposite angle sides and because they’re on opposite sides, they sometimes can conflict with one another. So there’s tricks to using this different color schemes and with a complementary color scheme. What you want to do is you want to use one of the colors as more of an accent color so that Let’s say we were gonna do a blue, a purple and a yellow orange, we might want most things to be purple. And we might use that yellow orange as the color that pops out, right, we talked about those warm colors pop out. So that might be for the text, we really want to draw the eye to split complementary, helps you a little bit with that problem, they don’t compete as much. So this is where you have one color on one side of the color wheel. And then you split the color that was a complimentary, and you have two others to use. And so this kind of helps you a little bit with that tension that can happen when you have a fully complementary color palette. A triad is when you have colors that work around the color wheel, right, so there’s three evenly spaced out colors. And also with this, what we usually do is we usually select two of the colors to be the main colors, and one to be that highlight color. And then finally, a monochromatic. And the nice thing about a monochromatic color palette, which is when we use one color, and every tin and shade is that it’s really hard to mess up. So these are really easy to be successful. And so when you’re just kind of starting out to play with color, any design, any branding, it might be a good approach. Alright, so we’re going to have a little fun here. I’m going to use the question box again and just see someone say jump back to slide five, I think I’m okay. Everyone see the paws and claws and hope that’s what’s up here. As long as you see that what I would like you all to do is type in what color scheme this is if anyone can recall. See if anyone recalls

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like the one thing with this, get a yes. But I see. Okay. Thanks, Sam. Complimentary Good job. All right. There we go. So you see this uses a color on either side. And again, it uses there’s more of this blue and there is less of the orange and the orange is used as something to pop out to us. All right, what about this one, anyone have any ideas the opposite can’t

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see?

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See if I get any jump. This one is analogous. Right, so we have the colors that are in a row on the color wheel. So we have the green, the yellow, the orange, and you can kind of get that it has that kind of calm feeling. Right now about this, one can guess this one.

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All right, we have a triad. So we have across three different colors. And this is really a beautiful project I found online. But really nice color palette. And I wanted to show some of these just so you can see, right, this purple is obviously not the same as that again, a lot of these colors, we can add the yellow, the sorry, the white and the blacks in it to change the saturation of them. So to wrap up our color discussion, these are just some tips that I think can be helpful. And I’m just going to show a few resources after this. I think that having three to five main colors in your brand is a good place to start. And for different events, different things, you might have a unique color palette, but this is a nice place to begin to know you have these three to five colors that all work together. And also what you can do when you’re building your color palette is you can build into brand guidelines how to use the colors. So let’s say you are gonna do split complementary and you want to make sure folks know this one color is meant to be an accent color, you can build that in so that that’s written down and folks know how to use it. Something else I think it’s important to do, we all use different tools for design, some of us might be using Canva for things MailChimp for different things. Some might be more advanced and be using Illustrator and InDesign, some might be using Microsoft products. But what’s really important is to always customize your colors. So try to avoid using the colors that are the standard colors, select from any kind of app, customize them to give them more personality so that folks really know this is you this is your brand. And it wasn’t just a default color. And then use what works. And so one of my one of my favorite things to do is to go to a museum and take some photos of some paintings that I really like and then use some different apps that I’m going to show you that can help you build a color palette from something else that already exists. So this is a nice way of knowing, like, Hey, someone else use those colors, they look great together. So I’m gonna see how they work for our brands. And so these are two of those tools. For those. I don’t know if the Adobe Color app is part of their free apps, but there is a phone app. And there’s other ones too. But what’s really cool about this one is you can hold your phone up to a painting or to a person to a shirt you like whatever it is. And it’ll actually pull up those colors for you. And you’ll see on the far left, you also can see some of those different color palettes, we talked about triad monochromatic, complementary. So you can actually build a palette based on a color. So let’s say you do have two brand colors you already use and you want to expand that color palette, you can go on some of these apps, put those colors in and it’ll help build out the rest of them. coolers was another one that I just found that I thought was kind of cool. And this one, there is a free version, you just see some ads, but it helps help you build a palette. So those are some good resources if you’re interested in building one. All right. So now type. So color was really fun type can be really challenging. And this is somewhere that’s worth investing the time to practice and get good at type. Because when it comes down to it, designers are communicators. And our job is to communicate something, you know, for all of you, it’s a good message or whatever it might be. And how we deliver these messages often are through words. And so understanding how to correctly use typography so that the folks that we’re sending this to our stakeholders can get the information they need as quickly as possible is really, really important. And so understanding of some tricks of typography help us a lot with that. First, we’re going to start with this classification. And so there are different types of typefaces. And there’s many more than this, these are just the four that I selected to share because this is what we use. More often these days. A serif have those little feet. And a sans serif sans means without just means it doesn’t have the feet. A slab serif has the serve. But this time, it’s straight across, and a script in writing calligraphy of typeface and just like colors, type give us personality type says something. So just the type you select says a lot. Sir serfs tend to be a little bit more serious, a little more corporate sensors have that more, you know, sleek look, slab service slab serves or kind of Bolger, sometimes they’re associated with education. So you see them a lot with things of education. And then scripts are a little bit more organic. A few details of just learning about type I I love talking to folks who are not designers about some of this and joke but what we spend our time doing, which is investigating the space between two letters. And that’s what kerning is. So it’s adjusting the space between letters, you probably will never do this. It’s just kind of a fun word to know. And it explains why some typefaces you might find online that are free, are really poorly like don’t work well, when you try to use them. If you download a font and you try to use it and the spacing between letters is really goofy. It’s probably because someone didn’t design what’s called a kerning pair. And that is when a designer looks at two letters, they do all the combinations in a typeface. And they specify the exact amount of space that’s needed between those two letters to feel even when a full word is typed out. And so sometimes free fonts are lacking that. So I think it’s important to know that to keep an eye out for that. Tracking is the space between all the letters. And so you often see this called letter spacing. And this is just a trick, when we start talking about the hierarchy, we’re going to build on how to stylize type, we want to know that we can track something out we can add that letter spacing, letting is the space between the lines, so double spaced, that’s letting right that’s the line spacing. And the design terminology letting actually comes from when type was set by hand. And they had either metal letters or wood letters, and they actually had different widths of lead. And that’s what they were put between the lines of chat. And so that’s where we get this word letting from. All right, so we have different ways we can indent type. So something that you might, maybe you’ve noticed, maybe you haven’t but now next time you pick up some kind of publication, take a look at it. Oftentimes designers do not indent the first paragraph because the idea, the reason we use paragraph indicators is to indicate to the reader that it’s a new paragraph. If it’s the first paragraph, they already know it’s a new paragraph. So a lot of times we don’t indent the first paragraph, but there’s different ways of having paragraph indicators and setting bodies of copy. So important especially with attention spans being down so much information being out there. You want to set A paragraph that is enticing to read and to make something enticing to read it to be easy to read. And there’s a lot of tricks of how to make a paragraph easy to read. One thing I don’t have on the slide, but I’m gonna share it right now anyway, is the GRE words per line. And so often, the typical word report has way too many words per line for us to actually be able to quickly follow to the next line, it’s why those often are hard to read. And so you want to think about seven to 12 words per line 12 Being a max, for how how wide a column is, and then want to think about the indicators, we only need one type of indicator. So if we do an indent, we don’t need to do a space between or we can just do a space between like you have on the right on the return. We also can customize that into something else that a lot of folks do, they just hit Tab, and it’s just is what it is. But we can actually customize that in most applications, you don’t want such an indent that it makes awkward spacing. And I know this is funny, and I’ll say it a few times. But people first when they look at something, they kind of scan over it. And if we really quickly look at something and think this is going to be hard to read, we don’t always read it. And having a lot of strange spaces sometimes does that. So sometimes a full indent actually distracts us from wanting to read something. Okay, a paragraph rag. So again, this is about not distracting your reader so that they want to read the information. A rag is the shape that type makes on the side that’s not flushed, so flushes flat. So what you’re seeing under the word rag is flush, left rag right type. And these both these examples are bad rags. And they’re bad rags because they’re distracting. So the top rag, the fact that it goes down on an angle like that, it makes a shape. And I started to think, Hmm, that look kind of looks like the wing of an airplane. And, and I don’t actually think that but quickly, I started looking at the shape rather than the words. And so for a designer, if you actually look on the right hand side, mine is my widow and orphan we’ll talk about I spent a little more time making it a nice rag. So there’s no lines that are really short, there’s no lines that are really long, it kind of comes in and out in and out in and out. On the left hand side under rag the second paragraph. Again, that’s a bad rag because I have these big gaps. Right, so the first two lines are too short, then the third one gets long and then short and long. So you really want to try to avoid a lying protruding protruding out you want to avoid a shape. On the right hand side, I have two other distractions. They’re called widows and orphans. And so the orphan is the line of text at the top on the right hand column, this is just running copy that’s in two columns. And you never want to end a paragraph with one line in the next column. And then the other one is ending with just one word on the bottom of a column, we try to always have a few words. So we usually try to push a few words down.

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Alright, I’m going to break some hearts here, Senator and coffee is really, really hard to do well, and a lot of us like to do it, we kind of default to doing it. And it you know, has more of an elegant look sometimes. But it’s very, very hard to control the rag. All three of these paragraphs are not done well. The second is just copied anyway. If you want to center copy, one trick is to add more letting more line spacing, because that helps avoid shapes. But why these two things I recommend folks avoid until they really have a lot of practice with type is that it’s hard to figure out where to jump back to on the left. So when we send her a copy, and we have these really short lines, it takes us a few seconds longer to know where to start. That’s why flush left is so easy to read because our eyes automatically see that straight line. And we know that’s where we go back to read. And so when you center, you’re already making it harder for folks to read. Flush right is even harder for the same reasons I’m going to the right, and I can’t rely on knowing where to go back to the left to start the next line. Subconscious quick actions might seem like not a big deal. But if just looking at something makes the content feel like I’m not going to have the time to read this, then you’re losing that person. Right. So we want to always make sure we’re stylizing our body copy so that folks want to read it. So now we get into a hierarchy and type pairing. And so this is where we start thinking about a system. So I’m trying to I can’t use the movies in a newspaper as my reference. But we think about any type of typographic system, an informational poster, let’s think about an events flyer for some kind of big event. You really quickly look at something and you you start to be like okay, all my headlines are this color this size. This font. And so I can quickly scan a document and I can find all the event titles, right. And then I know that the date is always all caps in this color. And so you’re quickly training your user to be able to find the information they need by building a strong typographic hierarchy. What I have on the left is a hierarchy that uses just one type family. And what I have on the right is a hierarchy that uses two type families. And what I didn’t show here was something that I had talked about, in one of the articles with DonorPerfect was about picking a super family. So there are families of type out there that have both serve and see answers together. Those are really great to use when you’re new to type, because they were designed to be used together. And so you know, they work well together. But if you’re new and you’re building a hierarchy, you’re building the system will color on my headlines, what size, what style, what same thing for my sub and my body copy, maybe there’s some kind of footer or caption, using one type family that has a lot of variations is a really great place to start. Because you know, they’re going to work well together. Let me just peek ahead real quick, okay. When you’re building a hierarchy, what you want to do is you want to always make sure there’s at least to style changes between different types of information. And so on the left where I have my one family, my heading is, it’s I think it’s called Extra Bold. It’s green. It is MC it’s sentence case, sorry, title case. So I have a capital letter than lowercase. And then my subhead is a different color. Now it’s all caps. It’s a different size, and it’s a different weight. So actually, I have four changes, but the minimum you want is two. So same with the body copy to that footnote, you’ll see there’s color change, one’s italicized one smaller. So you want to build enough variation in a typographic hierarchy. So there’s no confusion. So I’m never like, Wait, is that a subhead? Or is that the body copy that I know right away? Oh, that’s myself that that’s in that style. And these are all things we really quickly figure out in our heads. And that’s how we quickly scan documents and get the information we need. Now on the right hand side, we have two families. So now I’ve combined a serif and sans serif. So I’ve opened Sans and I’ve Garamond. And same thing, there’s always at least two changes. But I know these two typefaces work well together. Now, I didn’t include this document. But for anyone who’s really interested in type pairing, and learning about how to put together two different typefaces, there are a ton of online resources. If you just Google type pairing, there’s all sorts of sites that just document what fonts people use together. And with some font software. Now I know in Adobe fonts, they have this a lot of typefaces, they’ll say, you know, these other typefaces pair with this. And so you can actually see what a designer has already said worked well for them. And then you can try it out for yourself. So these are character styles, and I wanted to share this with you, because this will help you build a typographic hierarchy. So these are all different changes you can make to get to that to different changes between different information in a hierarchy. Obviously, we can do size, capitalization, different weights, classification, so I have my Saraf my sans serif. color changes. Style is italicize and underline isn’t regular. That letter spacing do is attract out is a tight, and even character with so do I have a typeface that’s really condensed and one that’s really why. So these are all different character styles. And so as you’re building this hierarchy, you want to think like, what could I try so that it’s unique for this style. And when I go to my other styles, there’s always at least two changes. We have some examples here, paws and claws here. So we have all caps, bold, dark blue, then we have a lighter weight, it’s still all caps, but it’s a different color. So we have three different changes. So you can see how that can work in real life. And we can talk about some type crimes. So these are things never to do with type. One is scaling. So a lot of applications let us artificially stretch typeface or make it condense. There are so many typefaces out there, you never want to do this, you want to always make sure you’re just selecting a typeface that’s meant to use condensed or extended proportions. So this one is is an easy one to do by accident. When you’re making a scale differences between different bits of information you want to make sure that you change the point size enough that I know you did it on purpose where the top one even though avoiding crimes are a little bit smaller, it’s a little hard to see but the bottom you can see it’s very, very, very obvious. And then finally stacking. So if we’re going to stack type we always want to stack all caps while I’m on here something I I know I didn’t include it, I will say because it is another type crime I see is that all caps is pretty hard to read, we really want to reserve all caps for headlines only, we never want to use all caps for a lot of body copy. Because without having those smaller letters there, it slows down our reading, they’ve done tests and it slows down our reading, we don’t have a as many different points on the letters to quickly figure out what they are. And so we read a lot slower when we read all caps. So you want to avoid doing that for body copy. So here’s my tips. When you’re building a typographic hierarchy, try if you can to stick to four point sizes. So you don’t have to have 100 styles, you could try to have four with that, if anyone wants to know because we’re always like, what is 12 points? And why am I picking 12 or 36? Just as a point of reference, one inch is 72 points. And so you can think about that when you’re selecting your point sizes, you know, do I want this type to be an inch tall? No more than two type families. There is great design that uses five type families. But again, if we’re talking to someone who’s a little bit newer to building a hierarchy to type families will help avoid changes. I’m sorry, a couple word issues. I was reading my at least two style changes, which is next. And then again, what I reiterate a lot here is the idea of two style changes between different types of information. All right. And finally, and we’re doing good on time I see brand assets. So some of our favorite conversations file formats. So in order to establish a brand asset library, we want to understand file formats. I bet some of you had experiences of someone asking for a certain file type, maybe even a logo and you’re like, Well, I only have a JPEG, I don’t have a vector version. What does that mean? And so I like to include this just to have a little bit of understanding of file formats on PNGs. And JPEGs are two formats we use a lot on the web. The main difference besides how they are compressed, is that PNG is you can have a transparent background.

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And so if you’re not using a vector file for a logo, it’s best to live with it for a PNG with a transparent background. Next up, we have this SVG, EPS, AI, these are all vector files. So vector files are mathematical files. So your logo have its built in vectors, it’s a lot of numbers. And that’s why you can scale to any size, the equation adjust. And it’s just as crisp at any size. So everyone should ideally have vector versions of their logos. Because then they could be thrown on a billboard that can be used on a post on a business card. Any size, where images are raster images, these are pixel based. And so when something’s pixel based, we only have the information that’s in that pixel. And as soon as that gets scaled up, we can’t add information. There’s no equation to say, well, there are some engines that that fake it for us. But it’s not as easy as a vector where it can scale. So that’s when we start seeing things get blurry and get fuzzy. A TIFF is a raster image that you use for print work. And so Tiffs are often CMYK. They can be RGB, but usually convert them. And we hear something called DPI dots per inch. And that’s how many dots there are per inch. So this is how crisp will the image be. So when someone asks you for a high resolution file, they’re usually asking for something that’s 300 dpi, that’s kind of the printing gold standard for getting a very crisp image. And finally, a PDF. PDFs are great, because everyone can read them. They’re great because the type can display in them the way you want it to be. And it will embed the fonts in the file. So if we use different fonts, and let’s say a PowerPoint presentation, and we send someone that PowerPoint, if they don’t have those fonts loaded on their machine, those fonts will default to something else. Whereas a PDF is actually embedding that font in that file, so anyone can open it and see it how you intended it to look. All right, so we’re gonna talk about four different parts of our asset library photography, illustrations, icons and patterns. And I promise this section is a little bit shorter than the other. So we will be able to get done in five minutes and answer some questions. So first thing is about creating consistency in your photography. And with all the nonprofit’s I’ve worked on this is constantly constantly a conversation, right? We have volunteers who took some photos of the event, you may have snaps on your phone, you might have a professional photographer for certain events. So there’s all different places you get your photography, so maybe stock photography, and so then we end up with his body of photography, but how do we make it feel like it goes together? What are those tricks are they feel like they’re part of the same family. All right. So I know these are bold and purple, but the idea was to colorize. So what I’ve done here is I’ve cropped, and I made them turn them black and white, and I applied to color to them. And the way I cropped them and the way I applied the color suddenly made these four photos feel like they’re meant to go together. And this is why you often see things in black and white or you see things in a duotone. Because it’s often a designer figuring out how do I take these four very different photos, some professional, some are not, how do I take them and make them feel like they’re together. And so these are some tricks on how to do that. And then to dig a little bit deeper into that first idea was cropping, right. And so if you look here, I’ve cropped all these photos that have people so that a tiny little bit of their heads are cropped off. So if I go back here, you see that wasn’t like that, and then I cropped them. Next I Colorize. That’s pretty self explanatory. The third one was the point of view. And this had to do with when I selected this group of photos to go together, I selected photos, where the the subject of the photo was not engaging the photographer, they were not looking at the camera. And I did that strategically. Because even though these photos are all from different places, that ideally these people are looking at something else. And this was about an article about kids and technology. It gave us that feeling that they were meant to go together, right? Everyone’s engaging with the technology, not with the person taking the photography. I have two resources here where you can download images that are open source where you can use them if you’re not familiar with Creative Commons. It’s a great site where you can search and you can see there’s public domain images, there’s images that have certain restrictions, like you just have to give the photographer credit, and you can search by them. And then Unsplash is another platform where you can find images that that photographers have put up there for folks to use, and you can use them without having to pay for them. Illustration is quick, this is just one page. One thing I wanted to point out with illustration, for those that are using stock illustration is that often on the stock sites, and this is from Adobe Stock, you can go to the bottom and see more from the series. And if you’re going to curate a body of illustration, you want the same illustrator. So you want to find a body of illustration that was meant to work together. And so that’s kind of nice, you can do that. I also found this site called undraw, which is a newer site. It’s really fun, though, I just search for teamwork. And I picked a color. And it actually adjusts the color. And again, these are open source, and just the color so that they are all in my color palette. I thought that was pretty interesting. All right, icons. So we often have icons that we use, whether it’s for a website, or an app, or just different communication. And like everything else is important that we curate these, they feel like they go together because you might be grabbing icons from different places. So these are just some tips on what you’re looking for to say, Does this icon work with my icon set? First, is that is it a stroke? Or is it a fill, so on the left, all these icons are made from strokes. And on the right, all these objects are filled in sometimes strokes are used to knock out of them. But in general, they’re filled in the stroke weight. So what is that weight of that object? So on the left, it’s lighter on the right is a little heavier. So when we’re curating a bunch of icons together, we want those strokes to be balanced. How is the icon simplified? So these are three different ways of simplifying buildings that all feel very different. And so when we think about icons, think about what it how is it simplified? Is it rounded? Is it squared? What is the designer doing to simplify them? The stylization? Alright, so by going for something that’s playful, and they go into something that’s more hand drawn. So I want to make sure how the person who created the icon Stylize, these that they were stylized, in the same way are my icons in shape. So the left their circle, or is the icon itself actually the shape. So the right one of these fruit, I thought they were fun. They’re actually squares themselves. For those that are unaware of the noun project, this is a great resource. You can get some for free, you can pay some for some for really low cost. But these are all designer uploaded icons, you can search for anything, you can see how people drew many things, different ways to really, really wonderful resource. And finally, patterns. So there’s different ways of building patterns. Not every brand has a pattern. But patterns are kind of nice to have for the times where you want something, but there isn’t actually like a given subject for whatever you’re communicating. You just want something that’s on brand and feels like you and so having some icon patterns are nice. The first one I showed was just a pattern made of icons. You can have something that’s more like a striped pattern. This is one of my favorites, not this image itself. I just grabbed this, but the idea of a typographic pattern, I think is a really fun way of getting messaging across also. So you can imagine, whatever you may do, you could create a pattern using your typefaces for your brand, maybe your logo that give a message and it’s trying to just become something you can throw on different collateral as needed. And then it could just be an abstract pattern. So something that’s just fun and playful and speaks to your brand. And that’s what I have. We have nine minutes now for some questions. So I’d love to do that. I’m going to I don’t know if I stopped sharing if you will only see me. Maybe you can hear if that’s the case. I can also just leave this on. Um, let’s see. I’m going to sort my questions here. One sec. Oh, it’s not letting me okay. I’m just gonna go through and get to the questions.

51:00  

Yeah, so the first question is, can you choose to analogous colors? I’m gonna just do the so that I can pull this over. Okay. Yeah, you can definitely pick two now its colors close to each other and skip one, I wouldn’t skip a color that really is one of the bold colors between but I could see skipping like a yellow and jumping right to the yellow orange. I think that would be totally fine. All right. We have our standard brand colors, but then use a different axis x and color for each program. I think that’s great. And I think even when you’re selecting those colors, because you know sometimes for some programs, you might have different collateral where you list all of your programs, it could be nice to sell look at them all together as one color palette, even though certain colors are only used with with your brand colors together. All right. I out trust your knowledge, Gerald about orphans and widows and direct mail letters, that they might help get the reader to the next page to get to finish there at that thought. Hopefully I defined raster and vector just quickly again rasters are pixel based and vectors are a mathematical equation vectors or will we we initially often design in Adobe Illustrator, there are other programs that also use vectors. But that was the first one.

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So pictures of photos, how should be they sent sent for print. So you should always try to have 300 dpi. And it’s always CMYK. If you can convert yourself. Now a lot of times printers will do this. For us, the converting to CMYK isn’t as important as the DPI. Because if it’s a really low resolution photo, it’s never going to look good printed, it’s going to look like it’s blurred. It’s not going to look professional. So that’s the most important thing. When you do collect resources and making sure that you’re getting things that are 300 dpi. As a point of reference, the image you’re seeing online when you’re just saving an image, it’s 72 dpi, sometimes it’s really big, and we can scale it down and then add more information. But often a lot of the things we grab offline are not large enough to print in a crisp way. All right, I got some more in here now. Black and white are neutrals. So you don’t have to count them as colors in your palette.

53:41  

think the question was Unsplash was the was the website for free photos?

53:52  

I have a question any recommendations or billing contests around Board staff and volunteers on rebranding and brand guidelines, I can just tell you from personal experience, it’s really tough. A board that I’m on that is for my it’s called Friends of hack, and it’s a nonprofit that’s supportive Philadelphia elementary school. It’s we just went through a big rebrand. And honestly, what my approach was was like you have to trust the folks that have this knowledge. And you have to, you know, being someone who manages a brand and being someone who designs that’s a skill, you have experience, you have reasons why you’re making these decisions. So I think talking about some of those reasons and how you present a brand is important. But I think also getting the buy in beforehand of like, hey, this isn’t necessarily about personal preference. It’s about what’s best for the brand. And I am bringing some experience to that, that I’ve done this research. I’ve taken these webinars I’ve practiced. And so you know, not that your voice matters more. But then you do have that with you and you you get to have those conversations and obviously take feedback. But I think it’s important to have those decision makers who can just say you know, good This is where we’re gonna go. This is why I incorporated this feedback and kind of keeping the train going. The biggest rookie mistake in design? Ah, that’s a great question. I think the biggest rookie mistake is falling in love with the first thing you do, because it can really just bring down morale. And I still do it a lot, is that we make something you know, creating is so different than other jobs, because there’s part of us in it. And it’s hard to get that feedback that someone else doesn’t see your vision. And so I think it’s really important to not fall in love with that very first thing and to know that, you know, some of that feedback is valuable and will only improve it. What are things like, we’ll use a pattern for sometimes a background, or sometimes just like in a footer of an email, you can throw a pattern in anything that helps express your brand, it’s like you’re adding more of who you are, you know, sometimes a pattern might be that is just on one side of a postcard, even if it’s a messaging pattern, it could be really important. So it might be something you use when you’re talking about your nonprofit, you’re not using a photograph to say you are but you still want to express what your brand is. And

56:25  

let’s see what else anything else that few more minutes. So DPI is data. The question is what’s DPI versus PPI dpi, or dots per inch, and PPI or pixels per inch. And so you see them both used. Pixels Per Inch is a little more of a broader term, because it doesn’t necessarily say the pixel is printed versus on screen. So it can be for both

56:58  

different sources use different titles for fonts, Microsoft are scattered is there. Is there a resource allows to find the closest matches, there’s um, there’s a app called what the font, and it’s pretty cool, you can scan any font, and it will tell you what font it thinks it is, but also gives you suggestions of other fonts close to it.

57:26  

So there we’re talking about ADA and readability. And our serifs easier to read. Yes, so So there’s science that supports both, unfortunately. But for a long time I was taught and I was teaching that serfs are easier to read as characters, because they have a little bit more detail on the letter forms. And so we quickly read them. But there’s also been a lot of studies on folks with dyslexia, and serfs are not easier for them to read. So I think it depends.

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So question is, Is it okay to create a local brand of an organization that has a national brand? That’s really up to the brand? When I worked with the ACLU, we did logos for every single branch across the country? I forget, it was somewhere around 150 At the time, I think. But then a lot of those smaller organizations did what they wanted with it, I think it depends on how important it is that, you know, are your stakeholders aware of the national brand? Is that why they’re with you? Do they trust that brand? And if so might be important to stick to it. My feelings about having photos of the board and staff on the website. My feeling about any of this stuff like team members names photos, is how often are you going to be updating that website because I think a lot of people have good intentions. And they think yes, I’m going to be constantly refreshing this, but I just looked at the nonprofit website that I run. And I was like, oh, man, half those board members aren’t even there anymore. I gotta jump on and do this. And so I think a lot of that comes down to, you know, do you actually have the time to commit to keep it up to date? And the final question, because it is almost three is should you use a neutral color as one of two primary brand colors. I don’t know the problem with that a lot of companies use gray as a neutral color, I think where you might start to want a bit more colors. When you express the brand, you might get a little bit bored of the neutral color. So I would say if that’s the case, I probably make sure you have more colors in your palette. Alright, it’s three o’clock. Thank you all so much for coming. I’d love to connect with you all. Feel free to check me out on ABI Ryan design.com or find me on LinkedIn and good luck with all your brands.