Every day there are many forms of communication being produced and sent out by businesses. The most common forms are email, social media, videos, websites, brochures, and presentations. The next time you are preparing a message to send or present to your audience, here is something important to keep in mind.
Every form of communication you send out must be unified. What this means is, your audience must gain the same experience from all your communication at every point of contact that they have with you.
A way to ensure a clear and consistent message is being projected at all times is via the use of branding.
What is Branding?
branding
[brand.ing] noun
the promotion of a particular product or company by means of advertising and distinctive design.
Branding is much more than a logo. It essentially represents who you or your business are. Your branding promotes you through the use of a distinctive design that helps your audience get to know you / your brand and form trust with you.
At Slidesho, before embarking on projects with new clients, we always ask for their Brand Guidelines before we get started on a presentation. It is the brand guidelines that will essentially dictate the look and feel of the presentation.
Within the guidelines we would expect to see detailed information in regard to the following:
Fonts
A font is the specific style of text you will use within your brand. Worldwide, there are three main font types. They are:
- Serif
- Sans Serif
- Script
For corporate presentations, we will typically always find a Serif or San Serif font in a client’s branding style guide.
Both of these fonts are a great fit for business as they are traditional and easy to read.
Serif fonts are fonts that have a small serif (stroke) at the end of each letter. Some popular Serif Fonts are – Times Roman, Century, Garamond, and Bookman.
San Serif fonts are fonts that have no strokes on the end of the lines, and they are usually considered to be modern and sleek. Some popular San Serif fonts are – Arial, Calibri, Tahoma, and Verdana.
As far as presentations go, we would not recommend a Script font, as they are harder to read and are not representative of corporate or business.
Colours
Your brand colours play a key part in your brand’s visual identity. Normally, we would expect to see somewhere between 3 – 8 different colours that will make up a colour palette within a client’s brand guide.
We will also find two different types of colours being primary and secondary brand colours.
About Primary Colours: A primary colour is the main colour/s used to identify the brand. They are the core of the brand, and you will typically see them incorporated in the company’s logo. A company usually has somewhere between 1-3 primary colours.
About Secondary Colours: Secondary colours are colours used to complement the primary colours. They usually come in the range of 1-6 different colours.
When working with brand colours in presentations there are two important things to remember – contrast and readability. There must always be enough contrast between the slide background colour and the text, graphics, illustrations and other elements on the slides. This is where a presentation designer is worth their weight in gold as they understand how it should all come together.
Logo
Very detailed information in regards to a logo will always be found in brand guidelines, this includes information about its placement, white space that needs to surround it, variations of the logo, what’s permitted and what isn’t.
When it comes to presentations, the placement of logos is also something that needs to be unified. Some clients may include their logo on every slide within a deck while others require it to be displayed differently (such as on the opening and closing slides for example), or they may have a simplified version of the full logo which can be placed on every slide.
Tone of Voice
The tone of voice is how your brand communicates with your audience. It represents your company’s personality and values. This is all incorporated with the way you deliver your message through the words you use and how you deliver them in your emails, social media posts, website design and of course presentations.
To establish which tone of voice to use, companies usually first define their target audience and their core values.
Imagery
Imagery plays an important role within every brand. The brand guidelines will convey a clear message on the type of images that should be used to ensure a cohesive mood and style to complement the brand’s promise.
For example, if you were a company promoting camping and the great outdoors, your guidelines would more than likely request for images to be used that incorporate an outdoor setting or promote and highlight nature.
The imagery section would also contain instructions around what type (or group) of people to include within the photography that’s used. For example, it may request to use images of families that look relaxed and happy in natural outdoor settings.
Every image used must clearly complement the brand.
Conclusion
Consistency is the key if you would like your brand to stick in the minds of your consumers (or clients).
Your brand guidelines should be treated as a rule book. If followed properly, it will ensure that everyone is always on the same page. This will lead to building trust between you and your clients which will then lead to more clients and a stronger business.
Do you need an on-brand presentation created? Contact the
PowerPoint presentation design experts at Slidesho today!
