Creative Tips #13: Professional Style

Last issue I promised you the inside scoop, the lowdown on how large corporations manage to communicate a consistent, professional image in all their communications. Now I'm going to let you in on the secret and show you how to get started revamping your own company's image.

First, let's take a fictitious but all too common example of what can go wrong. (Of course, none of it applies to your company. Ahem.)

The Sad Tale of Carrol Consulting

Jim Carrol runs a small management consultancy under the name of Carrol Consulting. He's a real pro, brilliant at what he does. Clients are happy, business is okay. But. (You knew there was a "but.") Too many of Carrol Consulting's letters and emails to prospects go unanswered, and in competitive bidding situations Jim loses more than his fair share of contracts, even when his proposal is very competitive.

Jim's a specialist. He knows how to make a business run smoothly, keep its finances under control and minimize its tax liability. But he's never thought much about company image. Carrol Consulting doesn't really have a logo, just the company name in a not-very-appropriate font for its website, business cards and letterhead.

Because Jim tends to write long client letters, full of good advice, he uses half inch margins and crams as much Times Roman into each page as he possibly can, considering he uses a full blank line between paragraphs:

Mavis, the company Treasurer, prefers Arial at 14 points. She uses Word's default margins of 1.25 inches on her letters. She believes that justified text looks better than regular left-aligned, so her "two spaces after every period" rule now leaves huge gaps between sentences (look at line three!):

Jim's assistant uses Times Roman, but dislikes the modern "block" letter style, where all the paragraphs start at the left margin. Instead, she uses a massive first line indent (a tab) of half an inch to start each new paragraph, and doesn't put any space between them. She also, sadly, puts two spaces after every period:

Of course, Jim and his staff haven't been reading these tips or they wouldn't do these things, but here's the real point: every communication to Carrol Consulting's clients and prospects looks like it comes from a different company. The only thing in common is the company name. (Don't even get me started on their website and emails.)

The result? Carrol Consulting has no consistent image, and that single failure says "We are a tiny mom-and-pop firm" with every letter that goes out. It makes them look like amateurs even though everyone on the team is a consummate professional. It's killing their potential sales.

Of course, having a real logo will help, but unless every communication from the company has a consistent style, layout and font, then every communication from the company will weaken its image with its public.

Getting Everyone on the Same Page

This problem will plague any business that doesn't have and use something that every major corporation relies on, a solution that is simple, obvious and mostly missing in small to medium sized concerns: a Style Book.

Almost everyone has heard of the Chicago Manual of Style, or the Associated Press Stylebook. These are famous examples, but not many people realize that every large corporation has such a book. IBM, Microsoft and Apple have them. So do UPS, FedEx, Triple-A, all the major banks, every university and the government.

A style book specifies margins, line spacing, which font at what size, key company colors and how exactly the company's logo must be used. It specifies which paper to use for letters, how mailing labels should look, what should be on the website (and what it must look like) and how the receptionist greets callers. It also covers such things as use of names, titles and technical terms, writing style (formal, informal, humorous, serious), even grammar and punctuation.

The style book is usually created by the Marketing Department or an outside consulting firm. It is a "live document," reviewed and updated regularly. It will contain many things we've covered as tips in these newsletters, laid out for all to follow. Its huge advantage is that, followed by everyone in the company, it ensures that a letter from the CEO and a letter from the accounting department clearly, visually, instantly tell the reader they are from the same organization; one that pays attention to details and is successful. It's that simple.

More on this subject in the next issue.

Bonus Tip

Your company logo is one of your most important assets, because it is the one consistent image in all your promotion, signage, business cards and company stationery.

When a design firm creates a new corporate identity program for your company, be sure to get "press ready, scalable" artwork files for every variation (full color, black-and-white, white only for dark backgrounds, etc.), not just images for your website and stationery. When you get them, make copies and keep them safe. Too often, in working with a client, I find that a) their long-gone designer didn't give them artwork files that could be scaled to poster size, or even brochure size; or b) nobody knew what to do with these strange files, so they're now lost.

Trust me: this is a big deal. It could end up being very expensive down the road.

Happy typesetting,

Alan Gilbertson
Creative Director
G&G Creative

The Creative Tips newsletter is published by G&G Creative, Tujunga, CA. More at www.gngcreative.com or on the blog.

G&G Creative specializes in graphic design, photography and copy writing for print and the web.

Copyright © 2009 Alan Gilbertson. All Rights Reserved.