The Brief Creative Newsletter
002 - LEGOs Are Your Brand's BFF
Not literally but there are a few lessons you can pull from your favorite pain in the foot.
RIP DAMs, Air 4.0 is here
This issue of The Brief Creative is sponsored by my friends at Air.inc
I've loved DAMs since before they were cool and over the years I've tried pretty much all of them but that all stopped when I started using Air about two years ago. I've loved it since day 1 but the team launched Air 4.0 this week and somehow it's gotten even better.
Air isn't just a DAM—it's not a DAM at all actually—it's a Creative Ops platform. Yeah, it stores your assets but you can also collaborate with your teammates, review and approve their work, easily find assets with AI search, and it integrates into over 1,000 different tools (the Canva integration is :chefs-kiss:).
Let go of that mess you call a Google Drive and set your team up for success.
The Spark
This is stuff I'm enjoying out in the world (it's probably not B2B).
Football season just started in the United States and if you don't know anything about the NFL, this meme sums up pretty much everything you need to know about my New York Jets (that and the term 'butt fumble').
So why are the Jets giving me a spark all of a sudden? It's because they're finally playing real football again. Sundays have been tough and I don't know about you but a rough Sunday usually translates into a rough week. But three weeks into the season I'm excited. I'm looking forward to Sundays again and that's getting me even more excited for the weeks ahead.
The Deep Thoughts
This is what I'm thinking about.
Earlier this week I shared a post on Linkedin about a key differentiator between good brands and meh brands. For me the best brands are built modularly. You can take them apart, move the pieces around, and rebuild them. Does that remind you of anything? Yup, that's right... good brands are like LEGOs!
The LI post goes over the benefits of thinking modularly:
- The democratization of creative
- Consistency across departments and customer touchpoints
- Higher velocity
- Better awareness
What the post doesn't cover is how it actually works so let's jump into that today. I'm going to cover two brands here, mine for The Creative Brand and my wife, Katie's for her garden consulting business, VK Gardens (yes, she does virtual consultations). Our businesses and offerings are pretty different but we still have our brands built out modularly.
These are just some of the more visible LEGO pieces. Other important pieces include:
- Brand guidelines - to help understand when and how to use colors, icons, illustrations, and imagery amongst other things
- Voice, tone, and messaging guidelines - to help clarify how the brand talks about itself, its' products, and even the competition
- Value Props - to help clarify what your brand talks about, believes, and is best at
- Software and Tools - to help bring these all to life—everything from a DAM to Canva to CMS and even your Google Slides are part of this
All of these pieces laid side-by-side look like no big deal, right? Every brand has a logo or typography or illustrations. The reality is it's how you use those things that make an impact.
For Digital Brands
For The Creative Brand, everything is digital. I have a website, I create content for Linkedin, and I make slides. My LEGOs need to make that easy and play well together. Here's an example of what that looks like.
Pro tip: when it comes to your website, these individual pieces can come together to create modules. These combinations make it so that you're not starting from scratch. For example, each of those columns above is a module that includes the icon, section header, and body text. You can make modules and components as versatile as you need.
The pieces are interchangeable yet they work well together. It helps that my brand is pretty simple (I made it myself and I'm not a designer) but when things get a bit more complex there's more to consider. Check out this slide example that uses 5 different colors from my palette. I don't make these calls randomly, I set up my own guidelines to maintain consistency.
For Physical Brands
For VK Gardens, there's a website and digital is important but it's a local business primarily which requires physical assets. So to differentiate from above, let's take a look at some printed materials Katie has created.
Let's start with a services one-sheeter for this week's Farmer's Market.
You're starting to see the variety come into the picture. Notice the rows in the top section and columns in the bottom section. They're using the same pieces and maintain a consistent look and feel although they're being used differently. You'll also notice a section header module being used (title + color). I know I specifically called out your CMS above but you can create modules for pretty much anything.
The lawn signs are even more versatile. Check these out.
The colors and graphics (not marked because that's a lot more arrows) are what I want you to pay attention to. VK Gardens has a wide color pallete so that Katie can create seasonal assets (think light green in the spring, orange in the fall, and white in winter). These two signs use the same structure but different color combinations and different graphical backgrounds. And even though they look different, there's no doubt that it's the same company and the same brand.
It doesn't have to be all colors and graphics, even documents can be on brand using these LEGO pieces. Before moving on, I need to shout out Jenn Proud of Gilded Grid for building the VK Gardens brand—she's incredible!
Phew.. that was a lot of arrows. The main takeaway here is that if you think about your brand modularly you can create pretty much anything. If you build the right systems for those modules (Canva, CMS, Capsule, Slides, etc.) and pair them with the right guidelines then you can hand over the keys to literally anyone at your company to create on brand content easily—this is one of the best ways to scale your content strategy.
The last thing to think about in regards to LEGOs and modules and all of the above is that you don't have to do it all at once. If you think modularly you can build your brand thoughtfully (it has to be thoughtfully) over time by adding new pieces to it. You can also evolve your brand by thoughtfully (I'm saying it again) replacing pieces you don't need anymore. Now you probably don't need that rebrand anymore either.
