The stages we follow when developing your new brand are three-fold; Think, Create, Deliver. But what happens after that? To ensure the roll out of your new brand remains consistent, we can provide easily editable templates for you, and even teach you how to use them. Our goal is not to simply provide you with guidelines to follow and leave you to it, we empower teams to be as self sufficient as possible by arming you with a brand toolkit that allows anyone, regardless of what department they work in, to be able to deploy beautifully designed, on-brand communications with ease and without the need of professional designers, saving you costs and time.
choosing the right software
It is important to make the right decision when choosing which software your templates should be developed in, and the usual debate is between Canva and Adobe Express. A key feature of both is a Brand Kit, which consists of your colour palette, font choices and upload-able graphics. The drag and drop usability of this kit into your templates allows those without any prior design experience to make subtle amends to the templates we provide you. This is perfect for social posts in particular, where you might want to swap out the occasional image, or text change. For those of you without in-house design capability, or those who have limited time to design brand assets, this becomes an efficient solution to quickly deliver content.
At Frost, although we offer to build your templates in either Canva or Adobe Express, we would suggest you opt for the latter. We work with many clients who want to explore larger scale design such as pull-up banners for events, but struggle in Canva to ensure that when printed, the design does not have a pixelated look. This is because of Canva’s limiting file format options, which means when uploaded, they are limited to how big they can stretch before reaching a blurred size. This is more than suitable for smaller sized social media graphics, but for those who want to explore larger formats, this option may be unsuitable to you.
Brand Consistency & Fonts
The key reason for offering these templates as part of our deliver stage, is to ensure that in every instance when your brand is seen, is it in keeping with your brand guidelines. However, Canva is also limited in terms of the number of fonts available to download. Adobe Express on the other hand has access to a large library of fonts that are more likely to be of higher quality, and also more likely to include your primary fonts.
When researching which software is right for your business going forward, it is likely that Canva will appear to be the favourite for those offering their opinions online. This is because of the range of templates Canva offers as a default. However, when Frost has built your templates in both our industry standard programmes and then the template software you choose, this benefit of using Canva default templates will become irrelevant towards your decision making. However, in terms of personal use outside of your business and brand, this may be the more favourable option for you.
Balancing Cost & Design Flexibility
Other factors such as cost will influence a clients decision, but we do encourage you to choose either Adobe Express or Canva, as both will support your brand going forward. However, at Frost we recognise that templates – although editable – can be limiting when the client wants a completely new asset designed. This is where we can offer our support to you again. We offer bespoke design services through monthly retainers or occasional ad-hoc jobs, ensuring your brand communication remains effective and consistent.