When Digital Brand Assets Are Neglected

While updat­ing Inform­ing Arts’ web­site I was reminded, the hard way, of the need to keep dig­i­tal brand assets cur­rent. We stum­bled on issues relat­ing to trade­mark renewals and obso­lete dig­i­tal file for­mats. Even strate­gic mar­keters like me can over­look details like how cur­rent are your brand assets — can you still make changes with exist­ing soft­ware tools?

While nei­ther issue is life threat­en­ing, deal­ing with brand asset “hygiene” issues has con­sumed time and money bet­ter spent on more pro­duc­tive activ­i­ties. Although I do con­fess to hav­ing fun with the designer and get­ting my hands dirty with Adobe Cre­ative Suite 4… Inform­ing Arts’ revised site is not quite ready to “go live,” but it’s imminent.

The Back­story: Inform­ing Arts Brand

A top-notch designer cre­ated Inform­ing Arts’ cor­po­rate logo and busi­ness papers in 1997, and her design strat­egy has served us well since then. A for­mer Aldus/Adobe designer, she now leads the cre­ative team at Pop­Cap Games. No doubt the qual­ity of her work enabled us to go years with­out hav­ing to update our brand iden­tity, except for minor tweaks to adjust from print to web. We printed reams of busi­ness papers, and now that most com­mu­ni­ca­tions are elec­tronic, we still have lots left in inven­tory! Only the busi­ness cards need refreshing.

Unfor­tu­nately, the soft­ware tool used to cre­ate Inform­ing Arts’ cor­po­rate iden­tity, Free­Hand, is no longer on the mar­ket. Time has marched on, and arch-rival Adobe Illus­tra­tor CS4 can no longer open our 10-year-old Free­Hand files. Dur­ing the decade since our design was done, Adobe acquired Macro­me­dia which had acquired Free­Hand from Aldus and the orig­i­nal design­ers of the soft­ware. It’s been years since Adobe updated Free­Hand, a lin­ger­ing death, I’d guess…

So I had to hire a designer to recre­ate the cor­po­rate iden­tify files, to fix the con­se­quences of imper­fect file con­ver­sions. Had we stayed up-to-date with ver­sion changes in file for­mats, some of these costs might have been avoided. Luck­ily we had some ancient EPS and TIFF files to build upon.

Fast For­ward to 2010

Hav­ing said that, I chose to take advan­tage of this file update project to change fonts for Inform­ing Arts’ logo­type and busi­ness papers (in case we ever need to reprint them!)

The orig­i­nal design spec­i­fied Berthold Gara­mond, a type­face which is very ele­gant, with del­i­cate ascen­ders and descen­ders. These details look fab­u­lous on com­mer­cially printed mate­ri­als, or when repro­duced on a high-res laser printer.

But all that finesse dis­ap­pears on most com­puter screens, let alone mobile devices. We’d strug­gled for years when we had to insert a small ren­di­tion of the logo in an Office doc or a web file. So it was time to switch to a type­face that remained ele­gant and leg­i­ble even when dis­played on lower res screens and print­ers. We chose Cronos Pro.

And here are the results: Inform­ing Arts’ revised mark, dis­play­ing the com­pany name in Cronos Pro Subhead.

Lessons Learned

One of the inter­est­ing lessons we learned along the way was the reminder about doc­u­ment­ing all those last-minute design deci­sions, like exactly what Pan­tone color did the printer end up using… Our files called the color swatch “gold­en­rod.” Not a PMS spec, and not a color that has a con­sis­tent mean­ing across PC and Mac plat­forms, to say the least. My files did not con­tain writ­ten records of those final deci­sions, so we were hav­ing to make guesses about color choices and color ramp details.

We were also reminded that there were visual effects the com­mer­cial printer could achieve (in terms of a very sub­tle color ramp) that are still out of reach dig­i­tally.  Or at least, out of reach dig­i­tally for those of us not blessed with Apple-size cre­ative budgets.

Net net: a project we thought would take an hour or two con­sumed a day of a designer’s time plus half a day of my time. And when you pay by the hour for an expe­ri­enced designer, the cost is com­pa­ra­ble to what you’d spend on a new PC. Not huge in the grand scheme of things, but def­i­nitely a reminder to stay cur­rent with file formats!