Online Brand Guides and Protected Digital Asset Management Systems

Our graphic design agency in Manchester understands the importance of corporate identity and brand consistency throughout corporate literature and advertising collateral. All major brands have specific brand guidelines available for anybody who is involved in producing printed marketing collateral, designs for packaging, brochures, leaflets or anything else which requires the use of the companies brand or corporate identity. These guidelines include spacing around the logo, what fonts or colours can or cannot be used, design specific rules regarding slogans, image placement rules and other company specific rules regarding the brand or corporate identity.

In some cases, the brand guides are expensive to design and produce and there may be numerous copies required to be sent out to various design agencies who are involved in working with a particular brand. This is the case with companies who produce a lot of merchandising products for sale accompanied with separate advertising campaigns and shop interiors. The brand may be subject to change on a periodic basis, such as with a football club with players entering and leaving the club and the football kit changing from each season to the next.

This requires revised corporate brand guides to be designed, printed and sent out on a regular basis which can be rather costly. Our creative web design agency in Manchester have vast experience with designing hosted online brand guides which are password protected and editable by the owners of the brand itself using a content management system. Access to the online brand guide is controlled by the brand owners using a database driven password protected content management system and the same system is also used to maintain the content, upload images and pdfs and make these files available for download to privileged users.

Case Study - Manchester United Merchandising Online Brand Guide and Password Protected File Repository

With the online brand guide we designed and developed for Manchester United, we gave them the ability to upload players signatures for download by their allocated design agencies around the world who produce the printed material and packaging for various lines of Manchester United merchandising. The crest, high resolution images of the club and fonts are also available to download along with the guidelines for using these brand elements such as step by step instructions in designing labels for packaging, to the number of players allowed per label being available anytime online to anybody with access.

Content could be managed and changed at any time using the content management system, so changes could be made mid-season whereas the printed brand guide was only sent out on a per season basis. This means that the players signatures can be uploaded and made available at anytime, along with any photography and players who have moved to another football club can be removed.