In today’s digital world, maintaining brand consistency across an ever-growing number of marketing channels is a Herculean task. While tools like Canva and Frontify have made progress in digitising design guidelines, Relatial is pioneering an approach that redefines how brands manage their visual identity.
The evolution of design guidelines
Traditionally, design guidelines were static documents or digital resources that outlined how a brand should be presented visually. Platforms such as Canva and Frontify have digitised this process, offering templates and guidelines for users to follow. However, these approaches still depend heavily on users’ interpretation and manual implementation, which leaves room for errors and inconsistencies.
Relatial’s smart template approach
With Relatial, we have redefined the entire concept of design guidelines. Instead of simply showing users what a design should look like, we build a company’s design rules directly into our smart templates. This fundamental difference sets us apart from competitors such as Canva and Frontify.
Our approach doesn’t just guide users – it actively prevents errors by applying guidelines directly in the design process. This means users of all skill levels, from beginners to experts, can successfully create on-brand materials.
The power of smart actions
At the heart of Relatial’s innovation are our powerful “actions”. These smart features work behind the scenes to ensure brand consistency without distracting users from their creative processes. Let’s look at some real-world examples:
- Smart text frame expansion: If you enter more content than originally planned while creating a social media post, the text frame expands seamlessly and repositions other elements to keep the overall design balanced.
- Adaptive format changes: When a landscape banner is converted into a vertical billboard, Relatial intelligently rearranges the design elements to fit the new format while preserving the focus of the original design.
- Required input prompts: When creating a product flyer, Relatial guides you through entering all the required information – product name, price, features – and makes sure no important details are missed.
Real-world application scenarios
To illustrate how effective Relatial is, let’s look at a few scenarios:
- Franchise marketing: A global fast-food chain uses Relatial to support local franchisees. Branch managers can create promotional materials that automatically include local prices and offers while strictly following the global brand guidelines.
- Pharmaceutical company: A pharmaceutical company uses Relatial to create compliant marketing materials. The system automatically inserts the required disclaimers, ensures drug information is placed correctly and adapts layouts to the different lengths of translated texts for different markets.
- University recruitment: A large university uses Relatial to enable different departments to create recruitment materials. The system automatically applies the correct colours and logos for each department while maintaining the consistency of the overall university brand.
- Estate agents: A national estate agency uses Relatial to enable its agents to create personalised property listings. The system automatically formats property details, adapts layouts to the number of photos available and ensures contact information is always correct and prominently displayed.
Joint onboarding and template creation
We know that introducing a new design system is a significant undertaking. That is why we have developed a collaborative onboarding process that ensures a smooth transition and maximises the potential of our smart template approach.
When we begin onboarding, our team of experts carefully reviews all existing brand guidelines. We work closely with all stakeholders to translate these guidelines into actionable smart templates. This process often reveals new opportunities for efficiency and consistency that traditional design approaches cannot offer.
Refining brand guidelines for multichannel publishing
During this collaborative process, we sometimes find that existing design guidelines need to be adjusted to make full use of Relatial’s capabilities. Our system’s ability to seamlessly add different layouts and variants within a single template opens up entirely new possibilities for multichannel publishing.
This could mean:
- Adjusting colour palettes for better consistency in digital printing
- Refining typography rules for use across different media
- Developing flexible layout systems suitable for both digital and print formats
- Creating modular design elements that can easily be reused across different channels
Our team has more than a decade of experience creating templates for a wide range of industries and use cases. We use this expertise to guide you through the process, offering insights and best practices that can improve your brand’s visual communication across all channels.
Benefits of our collaborative approach
- Optimised guidelines: Your brand guidelines evolve, becoming more comprehensive and adaptable to different media.
- Efficient multichannel publishing: Create once, publish everywhere, with templates that automatically adapt to different formats and platforms.
- Future-proof: As new channels emerge, your templates can easily be adapted without starting from scratch.
- Knowledge transfer: Your team gains insights into advanced template design and multichannel publishing strategies.
Real-world example: PERI
Our collaborative approach has delivered impressive results for leading companies worldwide. Let’s look at how we helped transform the planning processes for PERI, a manufacturer of formwork and scaffolding.
PERI came to us with a set of brand guidelines that focused mainly on printed materials for its construction products. Through our collaborative process, we were able to help with:
- Developing a more flexible colour system suitable for all digital and print media, ensuring the distinctive yellow brand colour stays consistent across all platforms.
- Creating a modular layout system for product presentations that adapts to different ad sizes and social media platforms.
The result for PERI was a comprehensive, Relatial-powered design system that enabled the company to create consistent, on-brand content for everything from technical data sheets to social media campaigns – all with a single set of smart templates. This not only improved brand consistency across all channels but also significantly reduced the time and resources needed to create marketing materials.
Benefits for users
Because our template engine starts where others stop, Relatial offers numerous benefits:
- Streamlined design process: Users can create materials faster and need fewer revisions.
- Consistent brand presentation: Every piece of content is perfectly aligned with the brand guidelines.
- Democratised design: Employees from different departments can create professional-looking materials even without extensive design skills.
- Risk reduction: By enforcing brand and legal compliance, Relatial significantly reduces the risk of publishing off-brand or non-compliant material.
- Increased efficiency: Marketing teams can focus on strategy and content instead of spending time on manual design checks and corrections.
The technology behind Relatial
To deliver this solution, Relatial uses CHILI GraFx as its embedded editor. This powerful combination of technologies enables a robust, user-friendly interface that brings our smart template concept to life.
Conclusion
Relatial isn’t just another design tool – it’s a paradigm shift in how we approach brand consistency and design guidelines. By embedding rules directly into smart templates and using intelligent conditions, we enable companies to maintain perfect brand consistency while unleashing the creativity of the whole team.
Would you like to see how Relatial can transform your brand’s marketing? In a personal demo, we’ll show you how your templates could look and work within the Relatial ecosystem.
