Danny Dotson
It is important for your business to choose a tone and an editorial style that is in line with the values of your business and your target audience. If your business sells teen video games, you will not use the same tone and style as if you sell medical equipment.
Next to the editorial rules, there are also rules for inserting elements adapted to each of your company’s communication media. This part will take again the instructions to respect to insert all your graphic elements: the margin, the size of the logo according to the type of documents, the space between the logo and the text, the positioning of the elements, etc. You need to know what is a roadmap there.
The Right Choices
Finally, with the omnipresence of digital technology around us, it has become essential to also define a graphic charter for websites. In most cases, this is a continuation of the paper graphic charter, which also has to respond to the specificities of the web. The web graphic charter will be produced before the start of the development of your site. The web designer will then only have to follow it to create the interface, define the location of all the graphic elements, apply the colors, the typography, etc. and obtain an identification of the company as efficient as on other media.
Let us now detail the most frequent mistakes made when creating a graphic charter.
Having a graphic charter that is too strict or not strict enough
Your graphic charter must adapt to the different communication media of your company. Printing on paper does not have the same constraints as a website. Therefore, the charter must be flexible enough to adapt to each communication medium used.
Ask employees to use the graphic charter
The graphic charter must be applied to all official documents used by your company. There is nothing less professional than an email sent on behalf of a company without the standard signature of the latter. For emails, it is therefore highly recommended to create an electronic signature for all your employees in accordance with your graphic charter. You can also ask them to use it for their profile on professional social networks like Linkedin.
And why not organize a photo shoot of your staff with your company logo in the background?
Do not completely change the graphic charter overnight
It has already happened that companies completely change their graphic charter to revitalize the image of their company. Yes but, etc. Be careful, changing everything at all will cause a break with your customers who might not recognize you. It is better to evolve your old graphic charter little by little until obtaining the expected result. Take the example of the Coca Cola brand. Over the decades, the typography of the logo has evolved and yet in our minds, we have the feeling that it has always been the same.
