Juggling 3 Brands as a Solo Designer
Navigating a brand's visual landscape while including its sub-brands presents a unique set of challenges. As the sole in-house designer in a 300-employee company 🤯 ensuring consistency across multiple brands has been a big learning journey for me. Here's how I make it work:
A Centralised Brand Library:
One of the first steps I took was to create a centralised brand library housing all brand books and assets, from logos and colour palettes to typography and imagery. Making these resources easily accessible has helped to ensure that everyone is aligned. This library has been the backbone of our brand consistency, providing a single source of truth for all.
2. AI For Content Creation:
Integrating AI content creation tools has revolutionised our workflow, slashing time spent in content creation by a remarkable 40% 🚀. These tools have saved us time and also empowered our team to produce high-quality content independently. By automating repetitive tasks, I've freed up my schedule to focus on more strategic work, while ensuring the output remained on-brand.
3. Templates & Moodboards:
To maintain a unified look across all branded materials, I've developed templates and moodboards for each brand, which served as a reference for the entire team, ensuring that every piece of content adhered to our brand's standards. Regular quality assurance checks further reinforced these guidelines.
4. Being The Internal Sparring Partner
Equipping my colleagues with intuitive AI tools and templates, enabled them to handle more of the creative process on their own. This shift has allowed me to become the "internal watch-tower of branding", creating more feedback sessions and collaborative reviews, ensuring our final output aligned perfectly with our brand values and objectives.
5. Embracing Continuous Improvement
Brand consistency is not a one-time effort but an ongoing process. I'm constantly looking for ways to refine our processes and tools. Whether it's refreshing the brand library, exploring the latest AI updates, or tweaking templates to better meet our needs, continuous improvement is key.