Motel is great, everyone loves Motel, blah blah blah. Motel even has a brand! That people like! Who knew! 😂 As Motel grows, however, we have to make sure our brand stays consistent, as we move onto more online territory, we should have a guide that keeps Motel a consistent. For my second goal this quarter, I want to create a guide that includes the following content.
How do we use our logo? How don’t we use our logo? What versions are there and when do we use each?
How does Motel treat typography: mostly on the site, but also any situations type would be in a PDF or in print.
What’s Motel’s official color palette? I took some artistic liberties with the most recent version of the site, and want to zero in on exactly what colors we’re using and how we use them. Also answering: what happens when we’re showing a client thing? Do we use their colors or our own (case study scenarios, etc.)?
How are images treated (think of Jason’s work on the head shots, shapes and colors)? What style is Motel’s photography? Where is it used and not used, when do we use illustration?
This has also varied over the years, I don’t know the best phrase for this but Mark initially had a lot of diamond patterns, other geometric shapes. Than the most recent version led to just geometric shapes, and a different version of patterns… let’s solidify this usage.
When we talk about—for example—Motel Engineering, how do we brand and talk about that? I think this ends up becoming, simply, some combination of our typography and logo. But want to make sure it’s documented somewhere for when it comes up.
The best example of this in action would be our social media accounts (more on this later). How does Motel talk? What does it sound like when you read words “Motel” the organization has posted somewhere online.
How does Motel talk on social media? If everything was stripped away, what would be our bare bones strategy (a template for, we’re posting about a thing / what to say)? What I’d like to get to here: is multiple people contributing to Motel’s social media accounts (happening), and it being consistent, and sounding like the same voice (not happening).
Aside: I believe social media has a bigger impact than we’ve given credit. When we do something on the internet (not often yet, but hopefully more), people immediately are drawn too any public point of contact we have: Twitter, Facebook, Medium, Github, Product Hunt. IMO we should work to keep this consistent and high quality, just as we do with the rest of our work.
Along with voice, and how we talk about Motel, socially. I’d like to create a brief guide for how an individual at Motel could do something on behalf of Motel, and ship a product. This came up most recently with Jason’s emoji icons, and will come up again soon with Alex’s game (I believe). Ideally, this happens more and more, so I’d like to have a game plan for when it does.
In the unlikely scenario that someone important wants to talk about Motel, we could put together a simple press packet and have it ready! We just want to make all the work we did above (logo usage, etc.) readily available for someone outside to use.
Disclaimer: Along with the work Caleb and I are doing, I believe this may result in some hard conversations about describing what Motel is. Positioning ourselves on purpose, is not something we’ve done, yet. So, I guess get ready for that.