Digitizing the Brand

The optimization of a brand’s standards across multiple marketing or public relations channels should include taking a hard look at how a logo fits – or doesn’t fit – not only on business cards other printed materials, but also in select digital spaces intended to reflect the relevancy and vitality of your name.

Todd Razor

In the most recent issue of Acquire, we broached the subject of not over cluttering your website, and impressing buyers with modern designs that give them some room to breathe. This month’s topic revolves around encouraging brands to gain more traction or millage from new or existing pieces by contemplating how each image created for a brochure, magazine or newspaper ad, as examples, can be resized, re-shaped and ultimately re-purposed for use in web-based publications.

Let’s break it down. Say you’ve got a logo that on a flyer or your website renders at 1,000 pixels wide by 200 pixels tall. Now imagine taking that same logo image and scaling or otherwise shrinking it down to fit nicely in a square space that’s only 500 pixels wide by 500 pixels tall. Or smaller. In many cases, depending on various aspects of the layout and design, scaling it down leads to the display of a nearly unintelligible emblem and garbled text.

The good news is that social media sites such as Twitter and YouTube have recently launched new-and-improved profile schemes, following the trendy path of providing users with larger and more customizable spaces to upload logos and cover images. Twitter, for example, now boasts a cover image area that’s 1,500 pixels wide by 500 pixels tall, which is ample enough room to publish some of your most prominent photos or designs.

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, LinkedIn. Each in recent months and years have rolled out initiatives to develop increasingly sleek online canvases – each offering at least two unique spaces for images with varying file size or dimension requirements across the board – for users to populate with bold photos and creative designs that reinforce messages along the way.

Of all the world’s industries, real estate pros and the builders or remodelers that they represent can certainly relate to this old adage: “You can’t put a square peg in a round hole.” Given digital spaces are created as equally unequal, it’s important when developing a new logo or banner image – perhaps to launch a new real estate group or brand a neighborhood development, as examples – to consider each and every place those shiny new images will be, or you'd like to see, published.

Digitizing the brand may be nothing new for those of you who in recent years have launched a website, or like to stay active on sites such as Facebook or LinkedIn in the course of your life, business and career. With the popularity of Houzz and other sharing sites continuing to pick up steam, we expect to see greater numbers of real estate professionals and construction contractors clamoring for images that showcase the product, service or brand while paying more attention to the spaces in which those images could ultimately go.

In many cases, our first conversation with a new client includes asking for a copy of the brand's logo in vector format, as well as broaching the discussion of how that logo – and alternative images – may be remodeled, even improved upon, for use on the web.

From our perspective, taking stock of existing photo galleries and portfolio images – before figuring out exactly what can be reused, or what my need some building or remodeling for use in multiple online spaces – ultimately saves businesses both time and money because it allows us to squeeze new life out of static pieces of print marketing collateral while positioning ourselves as thought-leaders on the web.

Originally published by Todd Razor in Acquire Magazine.