YMT Vacations is a group travel company that offers vacation packages to mature customers.
This was not a complete rebranding project.
What I was tasked with was the simplification of the branding across all marketing and internal communications. This entailed an analysis of the last 3 years of marketing and internal creative. After which, the marketing team met and discussed what work and what did not with our customers.
The following problems identified:
1. Logotype usage was inconsistent across the company.
2. Color, fonts, icons and many other aspects across the company were not consistent.
3. There was no clear communication as to what the rules were for YMT Vacations branding for the various departments
In order to solve these problems, I was tasked with simplifying and creating an Identity / Branding Guide to share across the company and with any vendor that would use our branding in the future.
The following rules to cover most visual scenarios were created
1. Logo usages into 3 distinct scenarios; Full color against a white or light background, white against our brand color, and white against imagery.
2. Typography was updated to the more versatile and modern Proxima Nova across all creative with Palatino selected as secondary / companion font and Verdana selected in occasions where Proxima Nova could not be used as Verdana is a universal font.
3. Established usage and values for two of the main brand colors YMT Blue & YMT Red, extended color palette for future usage, and standardized values for all icons and colors used throughout the creative.
4. Identified all icons and gave rules for their specific usage across all creative
These rules manage to cover a myriad of scenarios that anyone creating communication or creative for YMT Vacations would encounter without being so restrictive that an experience designer would need to intervene.
This meant that different departments would use this guide to create communications with vendors or customers and keep a consistent branding voice across the board without needing specialized training with design tools.
