Why your traditional brand guidelines may not be suitable for the web?
In many cases when clients request a website, they usually already have a brand book with thoroughly created design guidelines. However, despite our big passion for consistency, sometimes we have to make a few changes or introduce new colours or even fonts when creating a website. Let’s see why.
We used one of our current e-Commerce projects to showcase issues we faced while working with brand guidelines. The goal was to create twin-websites for two divisions of the same brand. Each had its own font and colour libraries. So, as we started working on this project, we had to tackle 2 big and two minor issues. Here they are:
ACCESSIBILITY
It all started with us running the accessibility test for beautiful aquamarine colour from our client’s Primary colour palette. It is supposed to be a prevailing background colour. And… It failed the test.
So we came up with the closest version of that aquamarine that has no accessibility issues, and our clients kindly agreed to make the change.
Font
Original Commercial font price would be $996 for one computer, which wasn’t within our client’s budget. We decided to use one of the free Google fonts instead.
Minor issues
Icon colour
We noticed that on one of the two twin-websites the colour of icons wouldn’t go well – it will overlap with main purple. So we had to come up with a lighter chocolatey version.
Font weight
Although Semibold was brandbook-recommended for titles, we decided to try Bold and it made a difference. This time, clients asked us to go with Semibold anyway.
When introducing any change to brandbook guidelines, we normally discuss it with our clients and look for compromises. We hope this information is useful and wish you all the luck in building your eCommerce! Feel free to contact us if you have any questions.
