Brand News

Brand Platform Phase One Update

I promised to stay in touch via email regarding brand development updates. This is the first of a series of emails to provide you with information on next steps. We will continue to post updates at the communicatorsnetwork.fsu.edu and brand.fsu.edu sites.

For those of you who attended the April 25 brand development task force appreciation event, you heard from our President and Provost the importance of this collaborative effort and the university’s recognition of your hard work thus far.

For those who were not able to be there, you can view the event summary online at http://unicomm.fsu.edu/communicators/meetings/april-2013-brand-update.

The event was a moment to recognize your excellent work and completion of Phase One – but we have more work to do to develop the creative expression of our brand including the use of a new wordmark, tagline, copy and imagery to articulate the brand in alignment with strategic initiatives, such as the “Top 25” strategy.

Next steps

Phase Two will start in early June and tentatively conclude in early Winter with 1) the development of a mini-campaign to introduce the brand, 2) expansion of the brand.fsu.edu website, 3) proof points and distinctiveness for each college – and we need your help. Development of the creative expression will include development, testing and revision of concepts as well as examples and templates for your use.

We look forward to working with you to develop these resources. The following information summarizes the updates presented April 25.

The brand.fsu.edu site provides you with resources and tools during this “early sharing phase” of brand development and was developed from the feedback you provided. We look forward to garnering additional feedback from you as we enhance the site over the next few months. In the meantime:

Use of university seal, new wordmark and or/tagline

Registration of an alternate mark (referred to as the wordmark) and tagline are in in progress. Our General Counsel has advised that the registration process may take four to five months.

While we understand that you are keen to start using the wordmark and tagline, we know you will appreciate that for a number of reasons, both are quarantined until the registration process is completed.

The alternate mark (wordmark) will be limited in use – primarily for informal and social media communications products and campaigns. The university seal will be prominently used for formal communications projects, or as determined by the situation or design.
There is more work to be completed on the brand.fsu.edu site. During this transition period you are able to use the current tools and resources, including
Digital formats for the university seal are available at
unicomm.fsu.edu/brand/applying/seal

Design tools:

A new color palette was launched to ensure consistency for Garnet and Gold across all platforms: digital, print and licensed products, etc. as well as offering complementary colors
Primary and secondary fonts were selected to ensure consistency and ease of use for print and digital formats, such as web fonts.
Design themes are available – offering consistency on main themes (formal, contemporary and traditional) with options for to allow for creativity across the variety of audiences

Trademarks:

Working with Sheri Dye, director of trademark and licensing, we are drafting clarified policies for the use of athletic trademarks.
Once the alternate mark (wordmark) is available, following registration, the brand guidelines will provide direction for the use of athletic images vs. academic marks.

Brand website:

We still have work to do – and we appreciate your feedback during Phase One to tweak the site and content

Brand compliance review:

The brand compliance model is nearly complete – and early adopters are using the model. During this transition phase, we ask for your patience as we tweak the process and better understand the volume of projects and content that will pass through this process.

Key to the success of all of your hard work the past year will be to encourage your respective unit to align marketing and communications deliverables with the brand messaging and resources. We will work alongside you to provide education and training to further advance university culture toward an integrated and collaborative environment.

Your views and participation are important to our process and ensuring that we continue to deliver. In the next few days you will receive an email inviting you to participate in a survey regarding Communicators* Network – we hope you will participate and share your views on how we can continue to evolve this resource to better serve our integrated and collaborative efforts. As always, please contact me with your feedback and/or questions.