The all new Kentico brand style guide

Brand style guide

The story begins more than a year ago when we set up the new visual language of our product – with this project arose the phase of visual redesign. We realized that to maintain the identity and clarity of vision within all branded materials and applications we needed to prepare reusable patterns from a visual perspective. These patterns today are known as the Kentico brand style guide. The style guide serves as a manual of sorts for every internal or external graphic designer, so that they are able to work in the name of our brand in a consistent manner.
 
Over the past few months, we’ve defined color and typography guidelines for both the print and web environment. We’ve also established moods that we want to evoke on a higher level. The style guide is a live document that is still evolving, thus we want to gradually expand it in an agile way, which means that we will dive more deeply into its concrete application as soon as it’s necessary. All of these recently established guidelines are based on the new, revamped logotype.

Main Kentico logotype

We have now adopted a monochrome version of the Kentico logo. The previous blue and orange logo was too heavy because these two colors are from opposite sides of the color spectrum – therefore, they are difficult to combine with another color scheme.  We’ve also placed the new logotype in a badge to remove unbalanced whitespace. The whitespace used to be generated in a flower shape and was connected with the Kentico text. Thanks to the badge, it’s now easier to work with our logo in more complex layouts.
 
 
You can find all the necessary source files and color definitions for print and web environment on the new Logotypes and Graphics page.

Complementary Kentico logotypes

We also have some complementary logotypes that we wanted to be in sync with the Kentico brand, such as the Partner Portal, Devnet, the Client Portal and Kentico Connection – the pattern of these and similar projects will remain the same going into the future. As is shown below, we have four complementary logotypes in total.
 

The next steps

We are going to implement these new rules according to any future requirements – we are not going to work with any big design up front. We will soon be introducing new partner badges and certificates within the Partner Portal redesign. We would also like to apply the new style guide to our most important marketing materials in order to ensure that they are up to date. All of these changes are being done in preparation for the Kentico website redesign, which will be launched in 2015.
 
The good news is that the Partner Portal has already been built according to these new guidelines. Our product and Devnet, from a visual perspective, will undergo minor refinements in order to abide by the new style guide.

Takeaway

If you would like to use our logotype, please be sure to apply the new one. All the necessary source files are available at the Logotypes and Graphics page.
 
Thanks for stopping by. If you are not sure how to work with our new logotype, please do not hesitate to contact us directly at graphics[at]kentico.com.