• Context
• Defining the Goals
• User Research and Needs Analysis
• Creation of Optimized Assets
• Documentation and source of truth
• Evolution and Scalability
• Take Away

Context

Four schools under one education group aimed to streamline and centralize their branding guidelines. The goal was to facilitate access and consistency across their digital and print assets for administration, marketing, creative, and development teams. By implementing a consolidated Style Guide, the schools could improve brand coherence and speed up production cycles.

Defining the Goals

• Standardize and centralize visual assets: Create a single source of truth for all branding components to simplify use and ensure consistency.
• Optimize design efficiency: Enable faster production and deployment of digital assets by offering easily accessible, downloadable resources.
• Making life easier for content producer: Help people in charge of several schools find the right resources easily.

User Research and Needs Analysis

Conducted interviews with stakeholders across administration, and marketing teams to gather insights into digital production requirements. Key areas included social media assets, landing pages, and communication design elements.

Creation of Optimized Assets

Developed a shared library using Adobe Creative Cloud to house all branded assets, creating a comprehensive Design Kit for each school’s visual identity. Established a unified naming convention to streamline access and usage across teams.

The creation of the resources involved several levels of complexity and required a good overall understanding of each team’s technical challenges and constraints.

• Create a shared Adobe library for the creative teams, integrating digital assets for social media, landing pages… but also print assets for brochures, flyers, kakemonos…
• Create reusable templates for Google Suite media (slide, doc, form…) for administrative teams, keeping in mind “ease of use”.
• Translate the design values of graphic charters to match the front-end framework used by developers (colors, text styles, etc.).

Documentation and source of truth

Leveraged ZeroHeight for providing automatic updates to all design elements in a signle source of truth. Documented guidelines extensively, making downloadable templates, assets, and resources readily available for internal and external stakeholders.

Evolution and Scalability

Once the style guide adoption stage has been completed, the next step was to include more specific content such as video .mogrt (video animation preset) for animated content creation (e.g., introductions, title sequences). This integration aimed to standardize animated content production and reduce manual workload.

Take Away

By employing this unified style guide approach, AD-Education streamlined its brand consistency and increased production efficiency. The education group can quickly adapt their future branding and digital asset needs across all four schools. This ongoing project illustrates the power of structured, centralized design resources in enhancing brand coherence and operational efficiency.