Personalise your documentation with corporate branding

Have you ever struggled with ideas for making your documentation look like it belongs to your company? If so, check out the tips below for injecting your corporate brand into your documents.

Company logo
Most companies insist that their corporate logo is slathered all over the place. And it’s true – the logo is an important part of a company’s brand. But remember to think about your audience – is the document meant to be read internally or externally?

For documents that will be read by people outside of the company, you could consider including the logo in the header or footer of the document. This means that if a page gets photocopied without the cover, the reader will still know where the page came from. Alternatively, you could try adding the logo as a watermark.

If it’s an internal document, you probably don’t need to keep reminding the reader where they work. A logo might not be necessary. If it’s a large document, having the logo on the front cover is probably all that’s needed.

Fonts
Having a set of official company fonts is an easy way of giving your documents a consistent look and feel. Documents look great when the heading text is different to the main body text. If your company logo has text in it, you could consider using the logo typeface as your heading font.

Bear in mind that fonts that are too obscure can be difficult or expensive to maintain in all your documents. Consider using a more common font for your documentation.

Colour scheme
If your document is going to be printed in colour or viewed online, adding some colour is a fun way of spicing up your documents. Try colouring:

• headings and labels
• block lines
• table header rows and borders
• headers and footers.

If your company doesn’t yet have any official brand colours, consider using some of the colours in your corporate logo. If there’s only one colour in your logo, look at a colour wheel to find out which colours complement your brand colour. Normally the colours that appear opposite on the colour wheel are the most complementary.

When choosing which colours to use, bear in mind what the document would look like if accidentally printed in black and white. Try to choose darker colours for text, and lighter colours for shading the table header rows. Borders and block lines can work in dark or light colours.

Style, language and tone
This is one of the hardest aspects of branding your documentation, but is still very important to consider. The tone of the language in your documents can make the reader identify your company as fun, formal, relaxed, serious, approachable or unprofessional.

If the target audience for your company brand are young adults, the last thing you want to do is litter your documentation with enormous sentences and words with 4+ syllables. Likewise, if you’re trying to convey a professional image, you probably don’t want the language in your documents to be too colloquial. Consider the style of language you use as an aspect of your corporate brand.

Keep it consistent
No matter what components of your brand you decide to include in your documentation, make sure you keep it consistent. If you keep changing your mind about fonts and colour schemes, your readers are never going to form the image of your brand in their heads. Put together some document templates and a style guide to ensure that all your writers stick to your branding rules in their documentation.

Do you have any other tips for adding your corporate brand to your documentation? I’d love to hear your ideas!

Carys

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