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Overview

	SCENARIO
Designing an Organization’s Graphic Identity	15

• 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).

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:

The company profile: What you do, who your clients are.
The company name: What’s the name of your company? Is it completely functional (“Anderson Consulting”)? Or suggestive of a feeling or tone (“Wired Magazine”)? Or a sturdy acronym (“IBM”)?
Objectives for unified design: List the objectives for your design, overall. Do you want an edgy, aggressive look? A calm, sophisticated, elegant look? A fun, playful look? What feelings do you want customers to have in mind when they think of your company?
A logo or logotype (a logotype is a kind of logo that is made up of text — Coca-Cola’s logo is one example of a logotype).

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

Letterhead: Create a letterhead that includes the company name and logo, address, and URL. Other elements (Twitter handle, e-mail address) can be used if they seem appropriate.
A business card: Create a sample business card for an employee of the company that uses the logo.
An invoice: Depending on the type of company, you may need to produce invoices for customers.
A web banner ad: An ad for your company to be placed on other companies’ websites, either at 728 × 90 (horizontal) pixels or 120 × 240 (vertical) pixels.
A Twitter home page: Include an appropriate background, avatar (which may be your logo), and several sample tweets.
A business envelope: A standard business envelope that uses the logo somewhere (not necessarily at top left, but it can be) as well as the address information for the company (which must be in the top left corner).
Another type of text: If your organization will frequently create other types of texts that would benefit from consistent graphic identity, you can create or mock up one of those. For example, if you think your organization will be producing different types of clothing (for public relations or organizational morale) such as T-shirts, hoodies, or hats, you could use a graphics program to mock up one example of a T-shirt that follows the graphic identity manual.

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.