How your brand is perceived online is as important as its offline presence. Obvious though this sounds, in practice, it throws up an array of issues that are vital to address if you want your brand to translate successfully into the digital sphere.
The Internet isn’t just a virtual version of the offline world. It’s not enough to pop up a website and hope for the best. “During the 80s and 90s the Internet was used as an advertising medium,” says Jim Rawson, senior designer at IT services company PDMS. “Companies were mainly using it to put up websites that displayed slide-shows of their products, but that wasn’t what the web was designed for. It’s only now that we’re returning to the original purpose of the Internet, which is all about information-sharing, interaction and building communities.”
Fit for purpose
Using this as a basic premise, a brand should consider the web as a space to offer its customers and prospects a fully rounded, interactive experience of the brand in all its glory. “Brand experience design has emerged as a way for them to have a new type of conversation with their audience online,” explains Peter Davis, creative director at Amaze. “Improved bandwidth and web applications like Flash, Ajax and Silverlight, mean brands can stream content live to their audiences, and more companies are using interactive elements and animations to engage their online audiences.”
So, with that in mind, what are the fundamental points to consider when implementing a brand online? Davis says that consistency is key – when you go online, you want to feel the same way about a brand as you do offline. “People need to understand and feel connected to the brand, so creating a consistent and coherent persona and brand personality throughout all channels – on and offline – is really important,” he says.
Making sure that your audience connects to your brand is vital – but to ensure that connection happens, their attention needs to be immediately engaged. “People are far less patient with the digital environment than they are in the real world,” explains Nigel Steer, creative director at Purple Media. “An online audience can move away with a simple click of a button so it’s vital to be consistent in using the right fonts, colour, use of logo and statements that immediately captures their attention.”
Writing for the web
Andy Budd, MD and founding partner of user experience web design company Clearleft, agrees, saying that one way to capture an audience’s attention online is to have a very clear and concise strapline. “Words work very differently online,” he explains. “A quirky, mission statement that works well as an offline strapline for example, doesn’t usually work online. It needs to get straight to the point so people can see straight away what the brand does and what it offers,” he says. “We advise our clients to separate their online and offline strapline – taking away any prosaic words for the online version.”
He adds that good copy throughout a site can also encourage customers and prospects to ‘feel’ the brand. “People don’t spend long on websites – it’s not the same as if they were reading a brochure – they want shorter, punchy copy. They’re out to get quick results, so they skim-read and they tend to get bored and disengage quickly, so make sure your words are snappy and not full of technical jargon. People can take action straight away on the web, for example, they can click to download a brochure immediately,” he says.
Creating powerful online ads
There is similar advice for brands using digital advertising. Sarah Christmas, marketing manager at ATMAd, which prints messages on cash machine receipts, says focusing on the key points is vital. “There’s only a very short space of time in which to tell the story,” she says. “When advertising on digital panels on escalators on the Underground, if the brand isn’t well-known, and the logo and core message are only shown on the end panel, it’s easy for the target audience to miss if it’s a convoluted story, so it’s important to keep it simple and repeat the logo, core message and call to action.”
So, how should a digital logo be best displayed? Davis says you need to think in 3D. “Online brand logos aren’t static – they should be multi-sensory – a living brand identity that evolves in the digital space,” he explains. “Think about motion graphics and how your logo can move, change and be optimised for online, mobile or digital screens. Maybe your logo can respond to user activity – change colour, shape, come alive, or be filled with user-generated content? The idea of involving audiences with a brand logo and identity, and building a direct, real-time relationship with them, is a really powerful concept.”
He also suggests using abbreviated logos – which are being used more frequently in social media – such as favicons (the little logo by URLs); brand avatars – a tiny graphic that will represent your brand on something like Twitter; or a mobile phone application icon. When shrinking your logo down though, it’s also important to remember that the small text, which some brands have on their logo will also shrink too, warns Rawson. “You’ll be losing that extra detail, so it’s something all designers need to take into account.”
The importance of font and colour
Along the same vein, how your brand’s font is displayed online also needs to be considered. “One of the most overlooked, and fundamental, factors to get right in digitising a brand is the style and display of the font,” explains Julie Strawson, director of marketing, Europe at Monotype Imaging. “It’s just as essential to be consistent with the font as it is with the logo because customers are used to seeing written communication from a company displayed in a certain way.” However, fonts aren’t always web-compatible, so to ensure consistency, technology such as Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (Sifr) can be used to insert rich and accessible typography into web pages, so it’s ‘on brand’ regardless of whether or not your users have that font installed on their systems.
Colour is another key consideration. Shaz Memon, founder of Digimax, a digital marketing agency says, “For online, we do not have exact colour-matching like we do on print. There are no pantone colours – in fact there are infinite shades and variations, based on the user’s own resolution, screen contrast and sometimes browsers.” This puts the brand identity – and particularly its use of colour – into the hands of the user. Amaze’s Peter Davis agrees. “Take downloadable brochures, which are increasingly replacing printed ones. If they are printed off, they’re only as a good as the deskjet printer that the recipient has or the colour of your website is only as good as the calibration on someone’s monitor,” he says.
“So for traditional brands that have moved online, and have spent years getting the right colour for their corporate look, it means they have to be willing to adapt and change,” says Simon Moriarty, studio director at Fitch. But although it’s very hard to match colours precisely from offline to online and get it right for all users, specifying hex numbers (which represent digital colour) in digital brand guidelines can help in making sure colour is at least consistent across all digital media. Rawson adds further advice: “A brand really needs someone looking after this on a daily basis, testing collaterol on a few different computers and emailing it to testers to ensure the colours – and of course, the other visual aspects of the brand – aren’t out of synch with each other.”
Another key issue to consider when it comes to using colour online is contrast – and getting it wrong can be a major pitfall as it impacts on the accessibility of the site. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) suggest ways to make it easier for users to see content – and one of those is to separate foreground and background colours, particularly helpful for those who are colour-blind, short-sighted or have tunnel vision. “Using grey on a white background for example, just wouldn’t be a high enough ratio for people with low vision to read,” says Rawson.
If your corporate colours don’t work online, Paul Squires, head of digital at Summersault Communications, suggests stripping back the brand identity to key areas. “We had a client that used green and red as its main colours “but this is the worst combination for colour-blindness,” he says. “As a result, we concentrated on the font, tonality and positive tone of voice for greater ease of use.”
Consistent, yet flexible
This type of flexibility is important to bear in mind when transferring your brand online. “Although consistency is important, an element of flexibility needs to be built in,” says Squires. “One or two colours across everything makes for consistency, but it might also be too rigid for what a brand is trying to achieve, as well as feel stifling to the audience.” Adrian Gill, partner, TDA, agrees, “Consistency doesn’t have to involve a formulaic set of rules and ‘matching luggage’. Instead, the brand should be rooted in an understanding of what the organisation means to its customers, with the flexibility to adapt to various online and offline media.”
This means that when it comes to establishing brand guidelines for the online brand, a certain amount of flexibility is also required – offline brand guidelines don’t automatically translate due to incompatibility of fonts and colours in online environments. Gill says the solution is to take a more fluid approach, even if it means going back to basics and redefining the brand guidelines. “As digital environments continue to evolve, marketers need branding frameworks – rather than rigid guidelines – that enable creative interpretation within their parameters across both existing and emerging platforms.
David Thomas, creative director at Base One agrees. “The Internet is constantly evolving – what was impossible a few months ago can now be used to make a brand really stand out and standards continue to be tightened surrounding accessibility, best practice in SEO and usability. So it makes sense that a brand’s online presence should be evaluated only at the time it is required, based on current business objectives, factoring in the most up-to-date technological opportunities, along with current best practices. The only time to create guidelines for delivering a brand online, should come only after a new site has been designed and built, delivered by the agency who created it, then merged into the current print guidelines for reference to creating new content for that particular site. Then to be ignored by any agencies appointed in the future when it’s deemed that version needs to evolve again.”
Another method, suggested by Moriarty for implementing digital brand guidelines, is to create the document as a downloadable PDF so all those involved in the implementation of the brand can use it, but so they are also able to contribute to it by uploading information too. “It’s not so much a rule book from on high that dictates, but more an interactive document. It’s a two-way thing – and it’s instant. Brands don’t have to wait two years for an updated document,” he says.
There are plenty of issues to consider when implementing a brand online. It seems the key to doing so successfully, involves maintaining consistency, but with an open flexibility that permeates throughout your brand experience, so your audience – and your employees – feel involved, engaged and a sense of connection with the brand – whether it be in the online or offline space.
Hexadecimal (web) colour values
Colours or styles for hyperlinks
Versions of logos for the web
Fonts
Accessibility
Social media, SEO and corporate communications
