Brand Level Learning & Guidelines Understanding for Decks

When you think of ‘McDonald’s, what’s the first visual perception that comes to your mind? You picture the iconic golden arches in the shape of an ‘m’, red and yellow colour palette and the tagline ‘I’m Lovin’ it’.

Such big brands, especially Fortune 500 companies and unicorns focus on standardising their brand elements and defining their brand touch points and personas. After all, the brand image creates a unique value proposition in the minds of customers, investors, employees and other stakeholders. So, it isn’t surprising the brands are rigid about maintaining the brand image consistency in all their marketing collateral, including decks.

As a creative brand presentation design agency, it is crucial that you comply with the brand image guidelines of the client. These guidelines are akin to a Bible or religion for brands. They are specific rules that help to spread their religion and have consistent expression. They give you a crystal clear idea of the brand’s expectations and what you need to execute in the deck.

Some brands provide comprehensive guidelines. Let me share an example from my experience here. When a multinational automotive manufacturing company approached our agency to create a deck, they gave us a 600-page guideline document. Imagine the number of hours our team had to put in to comb through this document and dig out guidelines that we could apply to the deck! Similarly, it took us 20 days to get the first slide approved by an international technology company as per their guidelines!

However, most brands do not have documented guidelines. This is a tricky situation because it eats up your bandwidth in finding out what a brand wants. In such a scenario, you should try to get in touch with the client’s brand training manager or QC manager who can give you these guidelines and also ensure that you understand them accurately.

Here are some pointers you should learn from the brand guidelines to make the deck:

• Correct and incorrect usage of the logo

• Minimum logo size and positioning

• Brand primary and secondary colour palette and their usage rules

• Brand typography

• Maximum and minimum font size

• Opening and closing animations

• Iconography style

• Visual motifs

• Maps, charts and other graphics

• Photography/imagery guidelines for usage on different mediums and if the brand has availability of prebuilt stock library

• Presentation template for internal and external events

• Editorial guidelines (for example, use of capitalization and sentence case)

As you can understand, learning and executing brand guidelines is a meticulous process in preparing a deck. However, if you get it right, you can save time, effort and other resources and of course, make the client happy.

We at INK PPT passionately understand brand guidelines and train our team before the execution. We take pride in this advantage we have in the market.

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