How to create a graphic map?

The purpose of graphic paper is to help you maintain consistency and professionalism in your communication as an organization or company, internally and externally. When your offices and the different departments of your company produce writings and images that respect a certain harmony, you present a coherent message, borrowed from unity and whose impact increases over time. This consistency must be found in all your communicationfrom a letter to a supplier, to a blog post, from a thank you note to one of your videos.

Most of the time, when I meet companies that wish to undertake communication operations, the request will concern a website or a brochure, a flyer, etc., without ever asking themselves the question of coherence and homogeneity with their existing communication. We thus find ourselves with an image that is totally dispersed according to the different works over time.

The graphic paper is the guarantor of yours visual identityit is the essence of yours brand. It is the first job you should start before even taking any communication action.

The objective of the charter is to contribute to the credibility of your company in the eyes of the outside world. Will someone join your organization because your logo is well represented or because you communicate clearly, concisely and professionally? Maybe not. Will people inside and outside your organization grant your message greater validity because you took the time to ensure your visual communication is consistent? Enough.

How do you recognize a brand? The first answer that comes to mind is logo. However, this is not a reality. Some time ago an experiment was carried out in a large supermarket chain. Coca-Cola bottles have been replaced by any soda respecting their color and character. No one read the name of the product and the shelf quickly emptied.

A brand is identifiable through colors, fonts, its logoetc. It’s everything in the graphics card that consumers end up subconsciously recognizing. It is therefore important to build this identity quickly before incurring too many communication costs.

The graphic card will recall the vision, the identity of your company. If you want to make it known that your association is family-friendly and use unstructured fonts and aggressive colors, you will definitely miss your target.

So where to start? Which direction to take? What do you absolutely have to think about? Here are some ideas that should help you!

The graphic paper begins with a Brainstorming

Before you write anything, design any logo, or choose which colors to use, examine the box brainstorming. we underestimate the power of stopping to think too much. I think it’s a bit French, we want to be in action and think, that doesn’t mean being active.

I therefore encourage you to completely review your organization’s identity during one or more brainstorming sessions. Then again, maybe you’ve never actually done it. This will be an opportunity to more precisely redefine your identity, those of its leaders, the people you want to reach and who match the vision of your organization or company.

Soon I will write an article on creativity techniques and in particular on how to conduct a brainstorming session. In the meantime, to help you, I invite you to consult these articles:

Why communicate

How to prepare your communication strategy

The 7 essential elements for successful communication

Once your identity and target audience are well established, it’s up to graphic rather than translating all of that through your chart paper. But what should your graphics card contain?

The writing style

The chart will indicate writing conventions, i.e. how to write your company name, slogan, etc. I designed the graphic map for the Right Bank Church in Bordeaux. Here is an excerpt from this paper that defines the writing conventions:

“When we mention the name of the church in writing, the writing convention defined in the graphic map is as follows: Bordeaux Rive Droite Church.

We never use the following formulas:

Church of the Right Bank of Bordeaux
Church of the right bank of Burgundy or other…

The use of the lowercase “b” on “Bordeaux” is just a deviation that we allow ourselves on the logo. The first mention of the church in a document must always be Church of Bordeaux Rive Droite (BERS). In the references that follow, the use of the acronym BERS is permitted if it is placed first in parentheses after the full name. The acronym must follow the following guides:

– No spaces or periods between characters.
– The EBRD must always be written in capital letters.
– The EBRD should not be written in italics.
– If the EBRD is bold, the full name should also be bold.

Example of use: The Bordeaux Rive Droite Church (BERS) is located in Lormont. The EBRD is located behind the Carrefour shopping center car park. »

Use of the logo

That’s all, you have yours logo that you just designed with the help of a real graphic designer during a brainstorming session. Now, what do we do with this logo? Also in this case it is the Charter that acts as a guide. Too often we see logos, sometimes cute ones, used in strange ways, on unsuitable or poorly cropped colored backgrounds, etc.

Try to find all the cases to avoid to effectively protect your logo. No texture should be applied to a logo so as not to modify it and to remain identifiable. It should be kept simple and clean. Likewise, image processing effects such as shadows, light halos, etc. will not be applied. Let’s save this for the little one’s birthday cards.

Provide some examples of placement, whether it can be used over a photo or not, be as thorough as possible.

Plan black and white and grayscale versions of your logo. Finally, it is important to define a «safe zone» around the logo so that it is never overlapped with another graphic element. Some examples taken from the graphic map of the Church of the Right Bank of Bordeaux:

Here is example of the graphic map I created for the municipality of Artigues-près-Bordeaux:

Use of the slogan

You might have a tagline, a catchphrase that accompanies your logo. You will therefore plan during the rental how it should be positioned, at what distance and when it should be present or not.

Colors to use

To easily recognize yourself, it is best to define a series of colors that you can use in the graphics card, and stick to this list! Colors have incredible power, it’s good to know what colors convey in the collective unconscious! It takes time for a brand to make itself known and enter the collective unconscious. To do this, never deviate from the rules established in the charter so as not to confuse the issue in the minds of your customers, members, potential customers, etc.

Remember, Coca Cola’s red label distinguishes it from all other colas (other sodas are red of course, but you generally recognize «red Coke» from the others at first glance. The same goes for «blue Facebook», etc.

The site Bullets from Adobe can be a useful resource. I will soon publish an article on the correct use of colors and the message they convey. Please note that you must provide color codes and matches for print and web. Therefore, colors can be produced in RGB, hexadecimal, CMYK and Pantone modes.

Here is another example of a card created by me:

Characters

Ah, the policiesthere is so much to say… Frankly, this is an area where it is really important to be accompanied by a professional. The characters tell a story, convey an emotion, they can be masculine or feminine, childish or even sober and elegant. They contribute greatly to the brand image you project.

Some, like colors, will bring a touch of seriousness and confidence to your identity. Obviously we won’t use the same fonts depending on whether your name is Toys’r us, Google or Apple.

As regards the last two brands mentioned, which operate in relatively similar fields, we can see how their graphic identities differ and do not try to communicate the same message and the same values. The goal is not to judge one to the detriment of the other, but to see truly different positions.

When you specify fonts in the policy, plan to provide them so that everyone can install them on their computer. Remember the uses of each character: paragraphs, headings, etc.

When should you use graphics paper?

On yours letterheadYours flyersyour websiteYours postersyour buildingsigns and all internal or external documents. We often encounter companies that fail in communication and struggle to achieve satisfactory results from their efforts. These failures often derive from a visual identity that is too «fragmented», difficult to identify and not very appealing.

To be serious, accurate et strict in these uses and your efforts will eventually pay off.

You can take a little distance for events. For example, a series of sermons on one theme will certainly lead you to create different images. However, quickly get back to the basics of your charting!

Of course there are many other aspects to take into consideration when creating your chart, we could dedicate a complete book to them, but this article gives you the basics and, I hope, will make you aware of this important aspect of your communication.