Internet Archives - Website Design Company Kelowna BC - Atomic 55

The Importance of Brand Guidelines.

Tatum G — Thu, 15 Dec 2022 20:02:02 +0000

uilding a brand is an important part of your business. However, there is more to a brand than meets the eye. Successful brands are memorable, trustworthy and connected. But, how do they achieve this? Oftentimes, the best and most identifiable brands have one thing in common—consistency. Consistency is to a good brand as brushing your teeth is to good dental hygiene. In order for your brand to do well, you must have unity in your font, colour, icons, ads, and logo. This is where brand guidelines come into play. In this article, we will be going over the importance of having solid brand guidelines. And, why they are a non-negotiable when it comes to developing your brand. Follow along below to learn more about this topic.

What are Brand Guidelines?

Brand guidelines are basically a rule book on how you can showcase your brand. They include details about colour, font, messaging, and so much more. Brand guidelines are often presented in an online or hardcopy booklet. In addition, they typically include examples of do’s and do not’s. A brand guideline package helps companies identify their brand and shows them how to use it in a consistent way.

Here are some of the elements included in a brand guideline package:

Name
Colour palette
Font/ typography
Graphics
Image
Logos/ Icons
Messaging
Tone
Shape

All of these elements must be related in order to achieve a successful brand identity. But, why is unity so important in a successful brand?

Why are Brand Guidelines Important?

Most businesses operate with more than one staff member. So, it’s easy for brand identity to get lost within the different roles of your company. In order to keep staff, affiliates, and consumers on the same page, you need to have clear instructions on how to use your company’s brand. From the wrong colour to mismatching fonts, there’s so many areas where your brand can get cloudy. Moreover, guidelines are essential when it comes to hiring new staff. Especially, those who govern your social media. Nothing says unprofessional, like an inconsistent brand.

A good set of brand guidelines will ensure that customers recognize your brand as your business grows and develops. Furthermore, it will provide tools for new and old staff to continue to uphold your brand. Guidelines also help to avoid confusion between your company and similar companies. Additionally, it sets standards for your business’s culture, standards, and rules.

Helpful Hints for Creating Brand Guidelines.

When you begin to come up with your business’s brand guidelines, be specific. The more details you include, the better. Providing specific examples of do’s and do not’s will prevent any mix-ups. Make sure you include details about when/where to use certain colours, fonts, icons, etc. For instance, if your company operates through multiple channels, make sure you are clear about what styles to use and where they are best applied.

You’ll also want to think about colour. Colour says so much about a brand and it can easily be misrepresented. The hue, shade, and saturation all matter when it comes to the unity of your brand colours. Lots of companies will often name their primary colour(s) in order to keep things simple and generate a level of importance around the colour.

Lastly, consider articulating your brand guideline package in a way that mirrors your company’s brand. For example, using the same colour scheme, shapes, complementary typefaces, etc. All of these details can help you solidify what your brand is to look and feel like: right within your own guideline package. The moral of the story is that you want to make your brand guidelines feel like an extension of your company.

Check out this example on Imborrable of Coca-Cola’s brand guideline package for a better reference.

Consistency, Consistency, Consistency.

Building a strong brand is all about consistency. In order to make your brand stand out in the crowd, a solid brand is essential. Having the necessary ingredients like a detailed brand guideline package is one of the best ways you can do so. The text you use on your website vs the text you use in your social media posts all matter when it comes to creating a noteworthy brand. Especially, if you have plans of onboarding new staff or partnering with other businesses. Rules surrounding your brand will make sure that nothing gets lost in translation. Whether that be through ads, packaging, or promotions. At the end of the day, a consistent brand will build trust and more profits.

If you need help building a robust brand guideline package, contact us today. We’d be happy to help you create rules that showcase your brand in the best way possible. For more information on our services, feel free to reach out to one of our team members. You can find the latest updates on our social media page or check out our blog for related content. We look forward to working with you in the near future!

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I watched the Internet change.

Jennifer Fuller — Sat, 05 Feb 2022 12:19:00 +0000

have been witness to the evolution of the Internet since it was unassumingly introduced into our homes in the early ’90s. We had a personal computer, the PC. It was jammed into a makeshift closet office just outside of the family kitchen. I can’t recall what make or model. It was not of the expensive fruit variety. I’ll surmise that it was a generic model my parents would have purchased from the computer department at London Drugs. It was square, very bulky, and had a decent amount of weight to it, framed in a chalky white, plastic surround, synonymous with the ‘90s itself. New, awkward, and symbolically shiny in what it promised. To connect you to information. To become more efficient. There it sat waiting to evolve.

The only thing more ‘90s was the oddly overstuffed executive desk chair that dwarfed everything else in the room and was impossible to move. The chair is where you sat and waited for the modem to do its thing. Netscape was the browser of the day and you had to dial in through a landline telephone modem to connect. A cacophony of oddly official sounds screamed from the dial-up modem. A series of screeches emitted during the modem’s ask-answer protocol, that made no sense to me at the time. The screeching signified to me that I could eventually connect to this thing called the Internet and that was all I needed to understand back then.

Before my best friend went away to law school, she was taking 1st-year Anthropology at UBC in the Okanagan. Her first introduction to the Internet was through school. It was 1996 and the assignment was to find someone with a home computer and the Internet and log on. Imagine that. You had to, first of all, find someone with a computer.

“We didn’t have the world in our pockets in ‘96. You had to saddle up with one of those nasty, big desk chairs and enjoy the soothing sounds of dial-up.”

I was the only one that she knew of at that time who had access to the Internet. In fact, I was the only one that I knew of too.

It wasn’t until 1998 that home Internet usage really started to become more mainstream. It was faster. You were getting top speeds of 56 kbps through dial-up which was considered blazingly fast. And it was also becoming more user-friendly. By 2000, early adopters began shifting to cable Internet and over 78% of North Americans had some form of home Internet be it dial-up or cable. This new form of entertainment took off like a rocket and look at us now.

The reason we were discussing Anthropology and the first assignment was because of my daughter. She’s now taking the same course, at the same University, but two-plus decades later the curriculum is much different. In fact, her first assignment in Anthro101 was to do a written media analysis on how social media affects the social environment of which we are part. In 96, the assignment was to find someone with Internet access. 25 years later, the same assignment was an analysis of what the hell have we done to ourselves at the hands of our own beast.

Over the course of two long, and recently unprecedented decades, I’ve witnessed the Internet change. In 1996 I used the Internet to research information on political science for my application to Journalism school. Everything I researched and noted on my application back then was incorrect. There was no Wikipedia, it didn’t come around until 2001.

The family computer in 1996

Hard Drives & Floppy Disks

The information I was diligently researching related to the Oklahoma bombings, The Yugoslav Wars, etc. at that time was gathered from random GeoCities websites and weird basement news blogs. There were no blue checkmarks to indicate you were reading a reliable source. Worldwide there were 45 million Internet users in 1996. 30 million of them were in North America.

“Being part of the Internet in the ‘90s was a little like being the first one at a music festival.”

You logged on and walked around aimlessly with a drink in your hand, pretending to seem interested in the warm-up bands. In reality, you were just waiting for more people to show up and better bands to play. Now the Internet is everything and everywhere.

It forms how we work, how we engage with each other, and how we entertain ourselves. I can’t think of any other invention that has evolved as quickly or robustly as the Internet has. Who would have thought that two decades later we would be mining an online frontier for currency? What was once a place to explore and gather really subjective content is still a place to explore and gather really subjective content. But back then, we kind of expected that the information might not be right. We checked other sources or we took it at face value and had our applications to Journalism school rejected. Now, we have deliberate bad actors flooding the Internet with, well, literally anything they want. Clickbait runs rampant, there’s good, there’s bad, there’s ugly and it’s a variable melting pot for the whole world to gather and overshare.

And gather we do. 75% of the world uses the Internet on a daily basis today. 6 billion of the 8 billion people on the planet. Are we addicted? Yes. I would say we have developed some unhealthy dependencies when it comes to instant gratification.

“Whatever you want is at your fingertips. Experiences, shared experiences, fake news, conspiracies, shopping, and not to mention your future anxieties.

NFT’s, crypto, and the dreaded or celebrated Metaverse. Our cars are connected to it. Our wallets are connected to it. Almost all of our homes and businesses are connected to it. We can’t live without it in the present day and that’s a far cry from where it was in 1996 when the assignment was just figuring out where to log on. There was never the assumption that in the near future we would never log off. Nor did we assume that the Internet would consume us the way it has.

I would call myself an early adopter of tech and the Internet. Atomic 55 was founded in 2001 and like all good dot-com startups, it started in my then-boyfriend, turned husband, and business partner, Mom’s basement. Our kids are digital natives. They’ve never known the world without a handheld device. I still remember when my 3-year-old walked up to his grandmother’s TV and tried to swipe the screen like an iPad. The Internet is like water to them. It just is. It always was. The question now is what does the next 25 years look like with the Internet?

Will we continue to evolve with it or will the Internet out evolve us? Time will tell, and if Anthropology 101 is any indication, then we should buckle up for the virtual ride into the future of connectivity.

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A Gen Z’s take on social media.

Tatum G — Tue, 04 Jan 2022 12:15:00 +0000

ocial media is plaguing the social environment in which we are part of. For most, time spent on social media has blended together and it is difficult to pinpoint the time in which we integrated ourselves into the digital world of likes and oversharing.

Personally, I can easily identify when I acquired social media. My parents–as people who work in the industry–made it a house rule that I wasn’t allowed to create an account for any platform (Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) until grade nine. I impatiently awaited this date with an overwhelming sense of FOMO that had been festering since grade six; when my peers first began delving into the world of Snapchat and Instagram.

“Now that I have been a part of the social media world, it is almost impossible to imagine life without it.”

I feel a strange attachment to it.

The thought of deleting the apps fills me with anxiety. What if I miss out on what my friends are doing?

In my experience, teens who don’t involve themselves in social media are often excluded from parties, events, and other social gatherings. The reason for this isn’t to be mean or hateful, it is purely accidental. Most teens my age communicate and plan solely using Snapchat, so if a person doesn’t have an account they are easily left out of the loop.

If I was to look ahead to the future, the only point in my life in which I can see myself deleting social media is when I am settled. This would look like having a set group of friends, and a family so as I wouldn’t need to be bothered by what’s happening with other people, because I have created the life that I want for myself. As a teen or even a young adult, this isn’t feasible because you are just beginning to form new connections and relationships with others. And unfortunately, this is primarily done through the internet.

I am not proud to admit that I average between 4-5 hours per day on my phone.

Most of those hours are dedicated to Facetime, scrolling through Instagram, and snapping friends on Snapchat. There is no app that truly affects my mood. Especially because I have learned to put myself in the shoes of the Influencer. That makes it easier to realize the embellishing that happens behind the scenes of each post. Instagram is likely one of the worst apps for your mental health because it is so easy to compare your life to another person. Learning to scroll through Instagram and understand what posts make you compare yourself to others and what posts motivate you is important.

To ensure my mind is happy, I have gone through my Instagram account and unfollowed anyone who negatively affects my mood. I now follow people who share my interests and goals. This way I have less chance of seeing things that would upset me or don’t align with my beliefs.

Watch the film below for a better understanding of the toll social media takes on Gen Z

‘The Social Dilemma’ does a great job of highlighting the downsides of social media. However, what they neglect to do is emphasize all of the positives that stem from a world that is so connected.

During the outbreak of the pandemic, social media helped families, sports teams, friends, and strangers all connect. It became a hub for human interaction that otherwise wouldn’t be there in the midst of a lockdown.

Social media was crucial in providing a platform for Black Lives Matter protesters. It also encouraged more people to get involved in the US election. Furthermore, it is a great place for inspiration and self-expression.

It is key for teens and all people alike to balance their time spent on these platforms. Understanding the good and the bad that can come from such powerful applications is key.

Personally, I don’t feel the need to change my social media habits, because I am able to put my phone down. I’ve found that I can still be social. I have almost no changes in mental health after being on Instagram or Snapchat.

It is evident that as a society we are changing due to the nature of social media, however, it is important to understand that there are positives and negatives to this change. As long as we continue to be self-aware and mindful of the time spent on our devices, then we can use social media as a tool to better our communities.

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