A Brand Guide for Non-Designers
Brand guides are often beautiful works of art in their own right. And they often deserve to be. It takes a ton of work, thought, and research to commit to all of the decisions necessary to produce one. Each of those decisions — from color palette accessibility considerations to the kerning between characters in a logo — can have huge ripple effects in all the thousands of ways that people can use them.
But sometimes brand guides can end up being intimidating. They are usually created by and for professionals who implement branding — designers and marketers. But for many organizations, it’s not a designer who implements the brand’s rules.
That’s the case of the Quest Forward Academies (now called Quest Forward High Schools). The private high schools were founded by Opportunity Education and were led by an exceptional team of educators. As Opportunity Education’s creative director of a small in-house team, it was up to me to not only create all the assets and rules but also create a guidebook for teachers and administrators to follow. My audience had no background in design or marketing but needed to understand and champion the branding guidelines during this crucial start-up period for each school. I needed to:
Explain the “why” in an accessible way
Make school administrators unafraid to make something brand-aligned
Create motivated, inspired brand ambassadors
Make the rules simple enough to ensure non-pro visuals would have obvious consistencies
Cover everything from logos to fonts to messaging to writing conventions in one, concise place
Below is a handful of pages from the Omaha, Nebraska school’s brand guide. Would you like to see the entire PDF? Get in touch.
“Jess consistently considered designs and assets through all lenses, maximized resources, and challenged all of us to level up and meet objectives to the highest quality. Her attention to detail and intentional approach are unmatched.”
Discovery Education