Overview

SCENARIO
Designing an Organization’s Graphic Identity 15
1

PURPOSE

Convey your company’s values and image

AUDIENCE

Potential customers of and investors in your company

CONTEXT

A small startup company that you want to create

TEXT

Short graphic identity manual, logo, and three sample texts

Overview

Several months into the process of forming a small startup company with several of your fellow students, you’re starting to think about approaching investors. As you imagine the various presentations and texts you’ll be working on, you start to break out in a cold sweat. You can’t see clearly what these things will look like — the PowerPoint decks, the professionally printed proposals, the logos on the letterhead you send out. When you think about them, the picture gets all blurry.

As you’ve started to learn more about graphic design, you’ve started to notice things that escaped your attention before. Maybe you couldn’t quite put your finger on it before, but now you realize that a lot of texts around you lack an awareness of good design. They don’t work to convey a strong message. You see small companies that use fonts inconsistently and inappropriately. You see color schemes that seem, at best, random. You also have the sense that these things matter, that even if most people don’t recognize bad design on a conscious level, bad design still affects how people interact with those texts. Bad design tends to confuse users, disorient and impede them rather than assist them.

At the same time, you also have a growing appreciation for design done well. Looking over at your desk, you see documents that are designed well, that are consistent and coherent: The setup instructions that came with your laptop look similar to the instructions that came with your printer — which makes sense, given that they’re both from the same company. The various programs that came with your copy of Microsoft Office — Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and so on — all share similarities in their design that make them seem like part of the same family.

This coherence and consistency of design comes from graphic identity manuals. Graphic identity manuals are what organizations use to create a professional, coherent set of standards for things like font use, logos, and other graphic elements. People in the organization refer to these manuals as they create texts so that they all conform to a consistent style. This is not merely window dressing: Customers rely on cues from graphic design to let them know how to read the texts they read. They also contain “best practices” for designing usable texts (rather than requiring people to guess).

2

For this scenario, you’re going to create a fictional startup company and create the start of a graphic identity manual. Your short graphic identity manual will be a two- to four-page text that includes basic information to give yourself a framework to design within. The manual will include:

In addition, you’ll develop at least three sample texts that demonstrate the graphic identity in action. Choose three from this list:

3

You should assemble all of these texts into a single document (a PDF, a Word document, or an InDesign file, for example) that your instructor is able to view.