Brands. Recognizable even upsidedown and backwards.

The name of your company is or should be a unique tie-in to the heritage, identity or other meaning of your business. It is the very first identifying mark of your company. In other words, our name establishes not only a brand identity but a corporate vision as well.

Why Brands are Important

A brand is a set of attributes that—in the minds of customers—distinguish one company’s offerings from those of its competitors. A brand identity is the visual and verbal expression of that set of attributes. A cohesive, distinctive and relevant brand identity is an enormous asset in the marketplace. The very name provides added value and—in many cases—can command a price premium. It is necessary to establish a direct and unbreakable linkage between the attributes of the brand and the way they are expressed. A strong brand is one with immediately recognizable characteristics that set it apart from the crowd. When current or potential customers see or hear that brand name, they form a positive mental picture, based on its well-established attributes.

Why Consistency is Important

The consistent display of your brand enables your company to benefit from the success of itself. You will also realize savings, in terms of both time and costs, in the development of communication materials, products and services, not to mention the increase in professionalism your business with take.

Growth Demands Discipline

As your company expands, your communications needs to become more complex. We will be introducing yourselves to many new audiences, and first impressions are very important. The consistent use of your brand identity will enable us to establish your company as a forward looking, professional provider of products and services. That is why each and every communication describing those offerings must bear the unmistakable mark of your brand identity.

Building Your Company’s Brand

It is important to understand that your guidelines provide for considerable flexibility. You shouldn’t want all your communications to look exactly alike. That would destroy their effectiveness. Instead, the main goal is to present a consistent “look and feel” that is unique to your company. This will enable you to continue to build your masterbrand, which will, in turn, enhance public recognition of every part of your company.

Everyone who works with Adobe InDesign realizes there must be more to this fantastic program. It is so versatile on it’s own, but if you dig deeper, there is still lots to learn. Here are 25 quick tips on how to improve and get more out of your experience.

25. Cmd-D (Ctrl-D) is the keyboard shortcut to place an image.

24. If Caps Lock is activated when you insert placeholder text, a different passage of Latin will be used.

23. InDesign will automatically update a linked image after it has been edited using Edit Original within InDesign, but will only flag it if edited otherwise.

22. Cmd-Option-Shift-C (Ctrl-Alt-Shift-C) is the keyboard shortcut for fitting content to frame. Cmd-Option-C (Ctrl-Alt-C) is the keyboard shortcut for fitting a frame to content.

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When I start a document, I always start with a few things before I can put my ideas down, planning and forward thinking are incredibly valuable when time is of the essence. Here are some quick tips I see many designers skip.

1. Plan what you want first. Do not design in any programs. This means use sketches, doodles, or any idea before you get into the tools. The Creative Suite is merely a design tool for which to carry out the wishes of the designer.

This includes making sure you aim for the right number of pages (this is especially important with pagination in booklets and magazines), bleed and page size.

2. Set your styles. This will determine what your document will look and feel like before you put the content in. This would include your body copy style (font family, size, leading, kerning, etc), all your headers and sub heads (I usually start with about 4 sub heads for large documents), image styles (borders, shadows, etc), and page numbering. I am a huge stickler when it comes to consistency, I think it should be exactly the same on each page and shouldn’t change any time.

This will save you hours later on when you see something isn’t consistent. I’ve forgotten to count before hand and screwed up a large magazine before, trust me on this one.

3. Set your margins. Do not let anything cross this line! A good starting point is a minimum of 0.125″ usually. A quick method I have used in the past is take the tallest capital letter in your main article title and double it. This is the width to start with. Larger banners will need a bigger margin, obviously.

4. Never “Eye Ball It”. You are a precision designer charged with a precision job, now’s the time to show it and not “guess” the distance. There are a couple different ways to make sure you can stick to this staple:

• Use guides. “Eye balling it” is what separates us as designers from the amateurs.  Little differences effect design projects in the largest of ways.
• Make little boxes that do not have any fill or stroke to a specific size and measure the distances to make sure everything is consistent. e.g. the space between a header text box and a three column body copy text box.
• Crack out your ruler to measure a sample if you need to. A calculator and thickness gauge are also important manual tools.