I hear businesses talk about branding all the time. What’s the #1 common thread that I hear? “We need brand standards!”
As a designer and marketer, I get it. Or at least I thought that I did until last week.
It was Wednesday and the fourth person that week had reached out asking for our logo. I had a epiphany. It was time for a press page. Pause. WHOA. As a startup this is a pretty amazing little moment.
So I’m super enthusiastic, pulling together all the right elements for a press page — our logo, our typography, our colors.
Then I started drafting the content.
I should begin by explaining how to use our logo.
“Use the color logo when…”
But I couldn’t finish the sentence. I’m on the marketing team and I can’t even explain when to use this logo?! Yikes.
What’s the reason for having different logos?
Okay. What now? I start asking around the office, and I gather tons of logo use advice. None of it consistent. Relief — it isn’t just me.
But we still have a problem: we let the brand go without setting any guardrails in place to prevent this kind of thing.
This is probably the result of two things:
- The team has grown
- The product and brand have evolved over time
At Drift we now have four different people working on design from Boston to San Francisco.
And since everyone keeps producing such cool stuff, it’s easy to keep shipping (which is what we want to be doing) instead of taking a step back every now and then to make sure we are all on the same page.
On top of that our brand changed drastically over six months. Our product grew a ton in really amazing ways. When I started in August we talked about bots as a cool idea for the far off future. And now we talk about Driftbot like an old friend.
So this journey led to building out a collection of our brand values and brand assets.
I collected everything that I could get my hands on that felt “Dirft-y.” I grabbed photos we took on our phones, tweets from customers, all of the logos we have ever used, our mission, etc. And I started organizing.
This collection quickly took form as a brand book. And it now represents the Drift brand as we know it today.
We believe that branding is so much more than a logo. So one of my favorite things about this book is that we break down our core brand values — and core value number three is Transparency.
So sharing version one of our brand book with you just seems right.
It’s a living document — which means we’re always going to be changing, updating, and tweaking, but it’s time to share V1 with you now.
Here’s the Drift Brand Book, version one: