- [Instructor] Once a client has chosen a design direction,
and all revisions if needed have been made,
it's time to set up the final brand assets.
In this movie, I want to show you
how I now dial in specific brand color
using the Pantone Matching System,
and how I organize all the final brand assets
so it's easy for a client to access them when needed.
Let me show you how I do this.
So we're going to go over all the brand assets
for Elevated Culture.
This was the primary logo
that he picked for Elevated Culture brand.
And when I work in Illustrator creating design directions,
and I'm dealing with color to try
to decide what are the brand colors
going to look and feel like,
I don't worry about dialing in the specific
print-ready colors such as Pantone.
I don't work in Pantone when I'm developing,
I just use raw color,
meaning I just get it aesthetically the color I want.
So if I click on this, on the type,
and we open up this,
it's just going to be a raw CMYK color break,
and that's okay,
I just know now that this is going to be gold,
and obviously this is going to be black.
Black and white are the easiest of all colors to spec,
you don't really have to worry too much about that.
So in this case, it was just dealing with a nice gold color.
Now, because it's gold, in certain circumstances,
let's say in seven years Omar has some special event
and he's printing up invites
they could actually do the gold in a metallic ink that way.
I think that would look beautiful.
So there is that possibility moving forward in the future,
but this color is just going to be a Pantone color.
So let me open up the brand color layer here.
So you can see the two colors were the raw colors
I worked with when I created the designs to begin with.
And that's once again just to lock in the look and feel.
But now I have to spec Pantone colors.
So there's two sets of Pantone colors
in the final brand assets that I'm providing
for Elevated Culture.
One is for process printing, that's CMYK,
and those brand colors
are Process Black C and P 12-7 C for the gold.
Now, normally I don't spec from this book
that specced this gold color out for process,
but I was having a hard time finding it
in what is called the Pantone Bridge Book.
They had some gold,
but it wasn't that specific look and feel I was looking for,
so I had to go to another book.
I'm going to show you what that is in just a second.
For spot color, think screen printing,
I specced Pantone Black Sea, and Pantone 1255.
This is from the formula guide,
the actual guidebook that they spec ink from, physical ink.
And screen printers have their own Pantone equivalent,
so if you use a formula guide color it'll inform them
what plastisol ink to use on the shirt,
or a water based ink to use on the given shirt
that they're printing.
So this is going to help keep your colors intact universally
with vendors moving forward.
Now, I have a Pantone swatch book that looks like this.
This one happens to be a little newer than the one I have,
but it's the same books that are in it,
and this is the Pantone Plus Series.
So you can see it has CMYK coated and uncoated.
It has Color Bridge for uncoated and coated,
and the bridge one is the one I tend to use the most.
This is an example of what the Color Bridge does.
And I usually, if in my design let's say I have a red color,
then I would spec from the bridge color
because the way it's laid out this color is the spot color,
and the color right to the right of it is the equivalent
or is close to the equivalent
that can get printing in process CMYK.
And I usually spec from this.
Once again, black was the easiest thing to spec
for this client because that's obvious it's black,
but when it came to the gold
I just wasn't finding a nice gold in the Color Bridge Book,
and that's when I moved over to a different book
that I don't use quite as often, that's the CMYK coated.
That's the word right here.
This is the uncoated but it looks the same on the inside.
It just has a coding, meaning when it prints on coated stock
it's going to look accurate.
You wouldn't want to spec an uncoated Pantone color
and then print it on a coated stock,
it wouldn't look right, the color values would be wrong.
And likewise, you wouldn't want to use a coated call out
on an uncoated stock,
you would want to find the same number equivalent
inside the uncoated book.
So those are all production things,
and if you work in-house at a design firm,
or for a larger company, and you have production artists,
this is what they're awesome at.
A good production artist
is worth their weight in gold in my opinion.
I got spoiled when I worked at Upper Deck for many years,
because I could design anything I want.
It would be a process print job,
you'd have a fifth color spot on it,
we'd do die cutting and foil stamping.
And I just designed it to be aesthetically what I want,
but I had no idea how to pull that off production-wise
so they could actually manufacture it.
And we had some great production artists
that could take those designs
and make them work with the technology I wanted.
So that's pretty cool.
If you have a production artist friend then appreciate them,
because that's a skill set in and of its own.
And that's all they do day in and day out,
they make sure your ideas look the best they can.
So I had picked the gold from the CMYK coated book
and then also from the formula book.
Once again, this shows the coated which I spec from,
but the uncoated it's the same principle,
these are solid based inks.
So if you're printing on uncoated stock
from Neenah paper, let's say,
you would want to spec from the uncoated book,
if you're using a vendor,
and the business card you're doing
are being printed on a coated stock,
almost always they are,
then you'd want to spec from the formula guide coated.
So I just wanted to pull that out,
you might not be super familiar with those things
when it comes to Pantone colors,
but for our design here
the final brand assets that I set up,
we specced from the CMYK coated book,
both the black and the gold,
and we also specced
from the Pantone Formula Guide coated book,
both the black and the gold.
So when it's all said and done all the deliverables,
and this shows every single brand asset
we set up for the client,
how they work on a light background,
these are all their own separate files,
we created the versions that are geared,
and styled, and colored for a darker background.
So all of these are what the brand assets were
that I delivered to Elevated Culture.
Now I want to jump to the desktop.
And I want to walk you through exactly how I organize
these brand assets so a client can utilize them
and access them as easy as possible.
So I'm on my desktop now,
and I'm going to access all the brand assets that we set up
with the proper print-ready color using Pantone.
And that's this folder here.
So I'm going to go ahead and open it up.
And this is how I organize the file structure
for delivering final brand assets.
I've set up folders and each folder is geared
for the exact method of printing.
If they need a black and white logo,
all the black and white assets are going to be in here
and they go in order from one in this case to five.
And then for CMYK, I have all the brand assets for CMYK.
And if we took a quick look on this,
it'll show you what each are,
that's why I save them with the PDF preview in them
so a client can hover over it,
and if they have Quickview on Mac or the equivalent on a PC,
they can quickly see if this is the correct file.
If they look at the name,
this name will correspond to the style guide
that I set up as well.
So it all works together as a system
to manage their brand assets moving forward.
We're going to skip the Hi-Res at this point,
I'll come back to that.
And then the reversed.
These are all the ones that work on the dark color.
And if you look at these,
you're not going to see some areas because they're white,
so they won't show up on a white background.
But these are all the assets
for the reversed format of the logos and spot color.
Spot color once again, physical ink,
this would be what a screen printer
would use to print merchandise
like t-shirts or sweatshirts.
I also provide image versions
of the primary and the secondary in a Hi-Res format,
in this case, JPG and PNG.
The reason why I give them these two formats
is because certain software only receives
certain types of formats.
For example, if they're using QuickBooks
to do all of their invoicing
and keeping track of their sales, et cetera,
they only accept JPEG format as your logo,
you can place in and put on your invoice.
So it's important to keep that in mind.
So under JPEG, I give them both black and white, and color,
because there is no spot or CMYK, this is RGB,
but once again matches the vector format
it's just in a raster format, in this case, JPEG.
So black and white for JPEG.
And for PNG, we do the same thing, black and white,
and we also do color.
But the difference between these and JPEG
is because it's PNG it has a transparent background.
This way they could use it,
if they're putting together a presentation,
and they're using PowerPoint or Apple Keynote,
they can use these files in it as well.
By the way, you might not know this,
but you can use vector files inside Keynote as well,
and you can copy and paste it
from illustrator into Keynote, it's really cool.
And we have all the reverse ones as well saved here.
And the reason why we don't have reverse on JPEG
'cause a JPEG can't have
a transparent background, It's solid.
It's a solid white background in this case for these files,
but all of these PNG images have a transparent background.
And you can see the desktop kind of shining through this.
And these are going to work in any context
that needs transparency in the background.
So this is how I organize and set up all the files
for the client and their brand assets.
Whether a client is a small business owner
or a brandmark for a larger agency,
I deliver the same system of organization for both.
Now that we have our final brand assets organized
we can start putting them to use in other ways
and design and layout a brand standards guide.