Brand Guideline Development for Rakuten Rebates
Client
Rakuten Rebates is a shopping rewards service that was launched in 2016 and it has been growing rapidly ever since.
Role
・Visual design ・Branding
Project
Improve existing brand guideline for the creative design.
Problem
There were many unwritten rules on the design direction since the service was growing very fast. A clear guideline was needed for us to be able to produce web banners with consistent design and quality regardless of designers.
Solution
I analyzed our design and our competitors' designs before I set the standards in the guidelines. After that, I built guidelines for the creative with examples of “Do’s & Don’ts” as well as the unwritten rules that we had.
Typography
Japanese advertisements tend to have a lot of text and look busy. We always tried to make our creatives clean and easy to understand. We had already had fonts that we are supposed to use, so I added basic rules for our use of typography. I believe that font weight is like a volume of voice. The thicker the weight is, the louder the volume is. Therefore, I simplified the variety of font weights so that our banners can always have a consistent volume of voice.
Typography for Copy writing
We run different campaigns related to marketing and sales regularly and often, so it is important to be consistent on the copywriting as well as design so that users do not get confused. Here I clarified rules on the copywriting that were developed over the years but never documented. Our designers usually write copies on the creatives together with stakeholders, so I included it here in the design guidelines.
Visual design
Rebates’ creative design had already had basic design guidelines such as colour pallet, using flat illustration, and use of shadows. The designers had followed it and kept developing, but we wanted a little more direction to create consistent design regardless of the designers. During the analysis of the designs, I sorted our creatives by campaign’s scales and elements, and then set the guideline for them such as colour contrast, amount of illustrated coins, and illustrations.
