Brand guidelines
Brand guidelines are often limited by their usability – they can only ever be truly useful if they are accessible and easy to navigate. We worked with the Universities Superannuation Scheme to make sure that their team would have access to an engaging and easy-to-follow set of brand guidelines that allowed for straight-forward interaction and download of key assets.
Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) is the principal pension scheme for universities and higher education institutions in the UK.
We have worked with USS for a number of years on design and animation projects, often taking complex information and breaking it down into an engaging piece for their external members or internal staff audiences.
We were recently asked to update their Brand Guidelines to:
We streamlined the design and created flexible templates that were adaptable for each section throughout the guidelines. We divided the information into easy–to–digest essential chucks, and where more detail was needed, we created in–depth technical pages.
Our designs were engaging, informative and minimalistic to allow the information to be understood and retained easily.
The guidelines are to be used by a number of different audiences including high-level board members, internal staff and external suppliers.
To address this, we created cheat sheets tailored to the audiences, dividing up the larger guidelines into smaller, relevant chunks with clarification on the intended audience and level of technicality.
This meant that an internal member of staff would experience a version that assisted them most when using the brand – users can choose to take in the information most relevant to them to improve ease of use, with technical information available for the appropriate audience, for example a printer who made need certain information.
To assist in the roll out of the Guidelines we created an introductory video for internal use, as well as a workshop video demonstrating how to use the Guidelines for the USS intranet.