The Audit

During Q4 2022 planning talks with the Sling brand manager, it was learned that the brand guidelines in their existing form were too design-centric, dense, and lengthy to be of real use to the Marketing team. So in the process of updating them, we set out to distill and consolidate the information to be more approachable and informative for all.

The evaluation and reconstruction took place over 4 months, starting with a collective audit of the existing guidelines. Through a tagging system on each slide in the top-left corner, we determined what would be kept (green), consolidated/restructured (yellow), or cut altogether (red).

The Rebuild

Following the audit, we realized that much of the existing guidelines would have to be heavily compressed to achieve the desired balance. With this in mind, we restructured the contents to reflect an aggregative approach, with a focus on simplicity as the parts added up to the whole. These parts would include fundamental components like Voice & Tone, Vision & Mission, Logo usage, Color palette, Typography, and Key art.

All of these individual elements come together in the form of a static design kit. Since custom photography and ad segmentation was no longer being utilized, these sections were scrapped completely and replaced with the Motion toolkit, Email newsletter DSM library, and updated Google Slides template.

Additional Resources

While the guidelines provided an effective resource for brand orientation, it didn’t quite fulfill the need as an instructional onboarding tool for specific deliverables. This became especially apparent when the agency transitioned into more of a brand-agnostic model, and designers who hadn’t previously worked on Sling materials required a more hands-on tutorial approach.

So I created the ‘SLING 101’ deck below, which covers most of the major production asset types. Following the brand guidelines design ethos, it was also intended to be as lean as possible and only provide need-to-know info. The formula for this basically translates to a 3-slide breakdown for each deliverable type, comprised of:

• What is it
• How to make it
• How to deliver it

In recording all the tutorials myself, I was able to outline the most fundamental aspects of each asset type and alleviate a lot of the early questions a new designer may have when approaching a project.

RESULT

The raze & rebuild of the 2023 guidelines was finished in April, 2023, taking 4 months of diligent work by a small team comprised of Emily Easton (PM), Farrah Hamdan, Spencer Stroud, Ellis Murray, and strategic oversight from Heather Bettis (CD). As Art Director, I oriented the road map, guided weekly brainstorms and development of each section, composed the final deck, and presented the final product to internal and external teams.

We condensed the existing guidelines from 80 slides to 35, effectively cutting the length by half while retaining much of the vital content and adding new information that hadn’t been in the original.

The other main thrust of the rebuild was to accommodate the co-ownership of the guidelines by making it user-friendly to non-designers. While there are still slides that are design-focused, they shy away from getting caught in the weeds and remain intuitive for marketers and creatives alike. This balance has proven to be effective, with the newest incarnation of these guidelines being more universally useful and accessible for all.

The Sling 101 deck then acts as a companion resource for designers who are tasked with creating specific marketing assets, alleviating the confusion that is typical when approaching a new project type for the first time. Both reference materials work harmoniously to help fill in a lot of the initial knowledge gaps, thereby increasing efficiency by answering questions before they need to be asked.