The importance of adding your brand’s identity to your technical documentation
All companies have a brand identity, whether they’ve thought about it or not. This identity may have been carefully and consciously constructed following countless meeting room discussions involving various departments and external consultants, or it may have simply developed organically over time, with little or no thought put into it.
What’s important is how this identity is perceived by the general public, and particularly by potential customers. Plus, it’s not so much the brand’s identity itself, but how consistently it is applied across every aspect of a company, from its reception signage, right through to its pens and pencils.
In this article we will focus not so much on drawing up the brand guidelines themselves, but more on how to incorporate your brand’s identity into your documentation, such as in technical manuals, product specifications, and price lists, to make them stand out from those of other companies.
Let ‘s say your manufacturing department has written up a user manual for one of your key products, and it currently looks like this:
The manual is informative, comprehensive, and easy to follow, for sure. But does it reflect your brand’s identity? Will users and customers remember that this product belongs to your company after reading it?
We were given the above manual by one of our clients, who asked us to rework the layout and the design, and bring it in line with the company’s identity, as presented on their web site.
Given the nature of the document, the client was looking for something clean and minimal, but also something that showed it was truly theirs, as in the past the company had issues with other companies copying their plain manuals, due to a lack of their brand’s identity being featured in them.
The result was as follows:
The process for this work was very simple; the client specified the fonts, logos and colors to be used. But even if the client is unable to provide anything, our designers can take the necessary elements from the client’s web site and incorporate them into their documentation.
Even simple documents such as price lists can make a great impression on clients if they are well presented, and match the company’s brand identity, such as in the example below:
Once the layout of your documents is in place, you may wish to have them translated into other languages.
Find out more about how HI-COM can help you inject your brand’s identity into your technical documentation here.
