Personal Preference Vs. Branding

To make a long background story short and necessarily vague:

As of yesterday I have a project that needs to be completed within the next two days. This project is the first of its kind and also one of the first impressions new hires or potential hires are going to get with our company. I have not seen any content for this project (I don’t know what the powers-that-be have decided should be included), and I don’t have any specific ideas with regard to artwork because many of the basic points of marketing communications have simply been missed in the rush to have this publication printed. There are fundamental problems with designing on a tight deadline in a situation like this. Almost no one in our company has any concept of what it means to have integrated marketing communications within their department, or within the company as a whole. In our case, the process should probably be a slow, teaching stance to educate others in the company about the scope of print and web design work along with the basic philosophies of marketing and branding. For all I know, I may be one of only a handful of people in our company (8,000 employees) who feel confident using InDesign.

I explained in an e-mail that there are a lot of things to take into account when it comes to branding something. If there is no existing brand identity, creating one can help users identify the department. Also, in our case, it will also tint people’s first impressions and lasting perceptions of our company as a whole. I talked about how important it was to make sure that all the communications with users carried a consistent look, feel and overall message. Even if no logo is created, the graphic elements and styles should be the same across communications.

With the tight deadline in mind, I asked whether or not any current ‘look’ existed for the department. We haven’t developed guidelines for the rest of the company to have access to (yet), so this department couldn’t really know the company style. I asked about colors, themes and the message this project is supposed to convey.

The response I got used words like “I like” and “would be nice.”

I know, I know. It’s just because no one else in the company is educated about the process of branding anything or creating a publication. But it still makes me angry to see one person’s preference (with no knowledge or more than a minute’s thought) projected on an entire department (and on the perceptions of the company’s new hires), but that’s exactly what will happen. Why? Because the assignment is due in two days and we don’t have a team of people to give it time and thought.

I’m no professional – I have no formal training in this field outside of some marketing classes, but I have read enough on the internet to know that perception is important! I’m nearly sure that “how the people who see this think of us” is not in anyone’s mind at this point (based on observations from past projects). Most of these people are not comfortable with digital technology either, so how do they get access to design trends? When they got a well-designed piece of communication from a company they like, I’m sure they didn’t recognize that it was good design but their perception of the company changed because of it. It’s easy to miss.

In the ideal world I would be allowed to write in a blog from work and about work. That way I could write a branding tutorial specifically for our company listing the components, type styles, logo (which sorely needs an update), colors and graphic elements. Most of the people who create the company publications on their own have Word or Publisher. They would benefit from a library of graphics to use in their publications. All would benefit from advice on layout, structure of content, writing style and production considerations. We (our department) or myself could become a center for advice and learning, giving tips like: If it’s going to be xeroxed onto colored paper, use only black text and desaturated clip art. When mentioning a date, the AP style is Dec. 12, 2007. Our company logo should be used in at least one place in the publication, in color if possible. Our web address should be included in at least two places in the publication. The top administration names should be included on these types of publications: x, and y. Those names should be presented in this way: xy.

We (or I) could provide tutorials and walk-throughs and checklists for things like “How to market an event,” “How to brand a program or department,” “Basic color sense,” “Typography 101,” “How to Make a Document Interesting,” “How to take a Great Picture,” “References for Learning About XYZ.”

In a perfect world.

For now, since anything published by our company has to be on internal servers, I will use personal preferences of one person to impact the publication, the department and the company. There is an art to giving people what they want.

Those silly .docx files

This is a re-post of some words I wrote to someone in an e-mail. They had previously sent a file with a .docx extension, and I figure this post might be useful for others to reference as well!

Extensions
The file extension is the bit on the end of the file, after the period, that tells the user what type of file it is. Besides telling the user what kind of file it is, it also tells the computer what format the data is encoded in. That is: which way to interpret the bits of data that make up the entire file. Have you ever tried to open a file with the wrong program? If you’ve ever accidentally tried to open a file that has a “.jpg” extension with Microsoft Word, you know that what comes out is a bunch of odd symbols that aren’t being understood by human or machine.

This is similar to what we saw when we tried to open the file you sent! Many symbols that made no sense. We did use Microsoft Word, because that is how the file was created, but it didn’t work. Here’s why.

Even though the file you sent was created in MS Word, take a closer look at the extension. Your file ended with a “.docx”

Microsoft Word
I must confess that the “why” of this entire story is way beyond me, but the fact is that Microsoft introduced a new file extension along with the new version of Word. The new extension (which is also present in 2007 versions of PowerPoint (.pptx) and possibly also Excel) is not readable by older versions of MS Word. It’s encoded in a language that only Word 2007 understands. When you save a document in Word 2007 the default extension is “.docx” and unless you change that when you save, your document will only be readable by folks who have Word 2007.

How to make Shareable files
So, you want to fix your files:

1. With your document open go to File > Save As. (note: if you’re saving for the first time since your document was created, File > Save will do the same thing)
2. The Save As dialog box opens. Notice that besides naming your file here, you also have another option directly below the box where you type the name. This is the pulldown menu for Save as Type
3. Pull down the “type” menu. Notice that .docx is probably selected by default. Select “Word 97-2003 (.doc)” from the list.
4. Name your document, then click “Save”
5. A dialog box appears saying something like “Older versions of Office may not support the features of this document. Are you sure you want to save to an older format?” Click yes and don’t worry!
6. Voila! Your document can now be opened by any version of Word, not just the elite Word 2007.

How we fixed the problem
Please note that this process would be very difficult from any machine that has restrictions on downloading and running executable files! If you’d like to equip a Windows computer that’s running an older version of Word to open .docx files, here’s what you do:

Download and install the Office Document Compatibility Pack from the Microsoft Website

If you have a mac, the compatibility pack is here

Hope this helps in sharing future files!

Getting the Word Out

Here is a sample strategy for a group of businesses or schools or people to get the word out about their organization in a coordinated manner without that huge learning curve most people are afraid of.