August 30, 2009

• grumblings

  So I am the webmaster of my school's American Red Cross website.  When I first began building the website they told me to do whatever but to make sure to include the stuff on Blackboard.  So using the creativity that is in my head, I put together a beautiful website (in my humble opinion ).  However, I immediately was informed about how many of the things did not fit the "brand standard" that comes along with it. 

  --There has to be a certain amount of white-space surrounding the symbol
  --Only a certain shade of red can be used (the specific hex code was given); other permitted colors and respective hex codes were given
  --They have a special font which I don't have (but they aren't as strict with that).

  On one hand it is good that they are really anal about the standards--it has made the symbol highly recognizable--I was told it was the second most widely recognized symbol in the world (second to the ever-present Coca-cola).  But reading the brand standards and regulations is driving me crazy!  For example, I was really excited about using red plus signs (+) as bullets; but that is against regulations, so I have to go change all of those.  Now I fun menu bar has to be changed to something much tamer and more boring.

  

  So I'm going to now have to gradually correct a bunch of my mistakes.  Which I don't mind changing mistakes, but it takes out some of the excitement.  I don't really feel like my excessive use of +s makes the symbol less potent; and I don't think the lack of white space really makes the symbol less recognizable, etc.  Boo!

  • 9:37 pm
  • 2 Comments