Why your brand templates might not work and how to fix it – Part 1
If you’re a growing business you’re most likely investing in developing your visual brand. Congratulations, it’s a big step! Even graphic designers struggle with it, and that’s our whole business.
There are loads of great resources and agencies out there that will deliver outstanding results both in reputation and bottom line. But there is something that is often overlooked: How your business can use its visual identity in MS Office (mainly PowerPoint, Word, and Excel). This is overlooked for a few reasons, and the line is usually that MS Office programmes are limited.
While they can be sometimes a bit tricky and temperamental, there are definitely ways to make them work for your business and brand. It all starts with understanding where the disconnects might happen.
The elements that have most often generated discussions have been: colour, fonts, and layout for printing. In some projects these issues have really impacted on the trust between team members, so knowing about them in advance will help you get the most from your branding.
Colours
MS Office has a very specific way of working with colours, which often doesn’t mesh with the way a brand palette is set up.
I like to think that MS Office tries really hard to be helpful in the way colours are used. Instead, it just ends up creating more confusion, especially when going beyond the basics.
To stop people wasting too much time selecting the right colours, it provides a palette that is applied automatically. This palette can be updated to match the business’ colours, but it still has to be made up of 10 colours. 6 of these will be automatically used for shapes, diagrams, and tables, the other 4 for text and backgrounds. This is not usually how brand palettes are set up.
The palette also generates tints of the main colours, in case your charts use more than 6 categories – and if you’re like some of my clients, this might often be the case. The tints look pretty nice in the palette above, but depending on your brand colours they could turn out to be pretty bonkers. I’ll hazard the guess that ‘bonkers’ is not necessarily the feel you’re going for in your business documents, and I can guarantee the tints your brand designer selected look pretty different.
While there is the option to use non-palette colours, these are not applied automatically. Depending on your brand that might not be an issue or it could be a nightmare.
Fonts
The way text looks is a massive part of the expression of a business, just as important as the copy itself. Selecting the right font is one of the most important aspects in influencing how a business will feel to its customers. Having a limited choice is often seen as an obstacle to fully achieving the business’s goals.
At the same time, as a business working with MS Office, your goals are also tied to getting the most out of the software you use. And investing in a visual branding that you can’t actually use at its full is not ideal.
I could hold an entire course on how fonts work in MS Office programmes, and I’ve written extensively about it in a previous blog.
Fonts are an absolute minefield, to the point that I’ve seen them almost ruin the trust between a designer and a client more than once. So make sure that you test whatever branded template you or your designer creates in the brand before committing to paying for font licenses or finalising your brand. The sooner these issues are raised the better it is for the project and the team.
Your IT consultant might be able to help you set these up too.
Printing in the office
This isn’t strictly an issue with MS Office, more of something that happens in tandem with having these templates. If you’re creating your documents in Office, there is also a high chance someone in your team is going to want to print them out in your office for meetings and reading preference, at least a good number of times.
Making sure these printouts looks good can be a challenge, not in the least because every printer will work in slightly different ways, especially in regard to colour.
But the issue that comes up most often is that office printers can’t print to the edge of the paper, leaving a white border around pages in full colours.
Depending on how you’re going to use the printouts, this might be acceptable. If not, the templates can be designed to take this into account and make it a design feature.
Once again, the theme is to have these conversations early, and make sure your needs are taken seriously.
Why it matters
If you use MS Office for in-house documents and your brand is not set up with it in mind, there will be discrepancies in how your documents look.
Inconsistencies and off-brand elements might be introduced, which can take a lot of time to manually fix. Or to save time you might send your clients documents that don’t match the rest of your brand, which can look unprofessional and lower their trust in your company.
When you invest in your business branding, you can make sure the results are the most effective by bringing these three points up early in the briefing process. Your colours, fonts, and layouts can be both representative of your brand and its values, and fit into the MS Office system.
But what if you already developed your brand? By knowing how the system works, you can adapt it and make it fit. There might be some compromises or a change in your current workflow however.
In the next part we’ll look at some practical ways your brand can be built or adapted to work for you in PowerPoint or Word. Make sure to subscribe here to be notified as soon as it’s out.
If you’re tired of your brand not quite working with your MS Office programmes, we’ll look at its specific needs and come up with a custom plan. You’ll have stand-out, easy to use templates that will change the way you see PowerPoint or Word for the better.
Book a friendly session here, I can’t wait to go beyond the surface of your brand.
