Brand Standards and Digital Asset Management

Widen recently published a new “Brand Standards” document in efforts to maintain a consistent face to the marketplace. This exercise has been quite a grueling process as we work to gather, catalog and manage all of our logos and templates to enforce consistent use of our branding. (Go figure, a Digital Asset Management company has many of the same frustrations as the customers we serve!)

Like many organizations, the most public facing and prominent marketing touch point is the corporate website. We launched a new website in Q1 of this year and just recently updated our brand standards document that is three years removed from the last major update. (I’m sure you can relate!) Besides our website, we have several other forms of digital media channels that we try to maintain consistent with our corporate brand—landing pages, blogs, social networking pages, print collateral and corporate documents.   

The part of this process that became particularly complicated was managing all the different versions of our logos… 

Widen has 35 different logos from 13 different styles of the Widen logo:

1. 3-D Reflected versions
2. Flat versions
3. Black & White 3-D Reflected versions
4. Black & White Flat versions
5. 3-D Reflected versions with the tagline “Empower Your Digital Media”
6. Flat versions with the tagline “Empower Your Digital Media”
7. Black & White 3-D Reflected versions with the tagline “Empower Your Digital Media”
8. Black & White Flat versions with the tagline “Empower Your Digital Media”
9. 3-D Circle W Icons
10. Powered by Widen stamps for customer sites
11. Widen Media Collective product stamps
12. Widen Appliance product stamps
13. Widen for Appexchange logos for our Salesforce.com apps

Portfolio View of the Widen Logo Library

As users of our own digital asset management tools we can control which formats are convertible and what conversion options are to be configured within our DAM SaaS application. Most of the 13 different styles have RGB (for web or print conversion), CMYK (for print only) and PMS (for print only) versions so that’s why we total 35 different logos. There are 4 "for print only" logos that can be downloaded only as the CMYK or PMS file in the original .ai file format, meaning there is no conversion.

The RGB versions hold the integrity of the file the best—particularly with the reflected red 3-D Circle W that has several different colors in it. The RGB files can be converted to any file format for print or web use. Conversion options include: JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and EPS (configurable to each client’s specifications). Therefore, instead of having on file and keeping track of more than 52 additional logos in different file formats, we only need to keep track of the 13 master logos that can be converted to any format using Photoshop conversions on-demand within our own Widen Media Collective DAM system.

Logo Conversion Options Configured Specific to the Widen Corporate Internal DAM System

Are there any other marketing people that can relate to the vast challenges in managing a logo library?  We’d love to hear your story!