Unleashing brand consistency: How Relatial's smart templates are redefining design guidelines

In today's digital-first world, maintaining brand consistency across an ever-expanding array of marketing channels is a herculean task. While tools like Canva and Frontify have made strides in digitalizing design guidelines, Relatial is pioneering a revolutionary approach that's set to redefine how brands manage their visual identity.

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The evolution of design guidelines

Traditionally, design guidelines have been static documents or digital resources outlining a brand's visual representation. Platforms like Canva and Frontify digitized this process, offering templates and guidelines for users to follow. However, these approaches still heavily rely on user interpretation and manual implementation, leaving room for errors and inconsistencies.

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‍Relatial's smart template approach

At Relatial, we've reimagined the entire concept of design guidelines. Instead of simply showing users how designs should look, we've embedded corporate design rules directly into our smart templates. This fundamental difference sets us apart from competitors like Canva and Frontify.

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Our approach doesn't just guide users – it actively prevents mistakes by enforcing guidelines within the design process itself. This means that users across all skill levels, from novice to expert, can create on-brand materials with confidence.

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The power of smart actions

The heart of Relatial's innovation lies in our powerful "actions." These intelligent features work behind the scenes, ensuring brand consistency without distracting the user from their creative process. Let's explore some real-world examples:

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• Intelligent text frame expansion: During the creation of a social media post, as you type more content than initially planned, the text box expands smoothly, repositioning other elements to maintain the overall design balance.
• Adaptive format changes: When repurposing a landscape banner for a vertical billboard, Relatial intelligently rearranges design elements to fit the new format while preserving the original design's intent.
• Required input prompts: While creating a product flyer, Relatial guides you through entering all necessary information – product name, price, features – ensuring no critical details are overlooked.

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Real-World Application Scenarios

To further illustrate Relatial's impact, let's consider a few scenarios:

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• Franchise marketing: A global fast-food chain uses Relatial to empower local franchisees. Store managers can create promotional materials that automatically incorporate local pricing and offers while adhering strictly to global brand guidelines.
• Pharmaceutical company: A pharmaceutical firm leverages Relatial for creating regulatory-compliant marketing materials. The system automatically includes required disclaimers, ensures proper placement of drug information, and adapts layouts to accommodate varying lengths of translated text for different markets.
• University recruitment: A large university uses Relatial to allow various departments to create recruitment materials. The system automatically applies the correct sub-brand colors and logos for each department while maintaining overall university brand consistency.
• Real estate agency: A national real estate company employs Relatial to enable agents to create personalized property listings. The system automatically formats property details, adjusts layouts based on the number of photos available, and ensures that agent contact information is always presented correctly and prominently.

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Collaborative onboarding and template creation

At Relatial, we understand that implementing a new design system is a significant undertaking. That's why we've developed a collaborative onboarding process that ensures a smooth transition and maximizes the potential of our smart template approach.

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When we start onboarding a new customer, our team of experts meticulously reviews your existing brand guidelines. We work closely with your team to translate these guidelines into actionable, smart templates within the Relatial system. This process often reveals new opportunities for efficiency and consistency that weren't possible with traditional design approaches.

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Refining brand guidelines for multi-channel publishing

During this collaborative process, we sometimes discover that existing design guidelines need adjustments to fully leverage Relatial's capabilities. Our system's ability to seamlessly add different layouts andvariants within a single template opens up new possibilities for multi-channel publishing.

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This might mean:

• Adapting color palettes for better digital-print consistency
• Refining typography rules to work across various media
• Developing flexible layout systems that work for both digital and print formats
• Creating modular design elements that can be easily repurposed across channels

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Our team brings over a decade of experience in building templates for diverse industries and use cases. We use this expertise to guide you through the process, offering insights and best practices that can enhance your brand's visual communication across all channels.

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Benefits of our collaborative approach‍

• Optimized guidelines: Your brand guidelines evolve to become more comprehensive and adaptable to various media.
• Efficient multi-Channel Publishing: Create once, publish everywhere with templates that automatically adjust to differentformats and platforms.
• Future-Proofing: As new channels emerge, your templates can be easily adapted without starting from scratch.
• Knowledge Transfer: Your team gains insights into advanced template design and multi-channel publishing strategies.

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Real-world example: PERI

Our collaborative approach has yielded impressive results for global industry leaders. Let's look at how we helped transform the design processes for PERI, a formwork and scaffolding manufacturer.

PERI came to us with a set of brand guidelines primarily focused on print materials for their construction products.

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Through our collaborative process, we helped them:

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• Develop a more flexible color system that works across digital and print mediums, ensuring their distinctive yellow brand color maintains consistency across all platforms.
• Create a modular layout system for product showcases that adapts to various ad sizes and social media platforms, allowing them to highlight their scaffolding and formwork solutions effectively.

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The result for PERI was a comprehensive, Relatial-powered design system that allowed them to create consistent, on-brand content for everything from technical datasheets to social media campaigns, all from a single set of smart templates. This transformation not only improved their brand consistency across all channels but also significantly reduced the time and resources needed to create marketing materials, allowing their teams to focus more on strategy and less on design logistics.

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Read more about the PERI's use case

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Benefits for users

By starting with our template engine where others end, Relatial offers numerous advantages:

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• Streamlined design process: Users can create materials faster, with fewer revisions needed.
• Consistent brand representation: Every piece of content aligns perfectly with brand guidelines.
• Democratized design: Employees across departments can create professional-looking materials without extensive design knowledge.
• Risk reduction: By enforcing brand and regulatory compliance, Relatial significantly reduces the risk of off-brand or non-compliant materials being published.
• Increased efficiency: Marketing teams can focus on strategy and content, rather than spending time on manual design checks and corrections.

The technology behind Relatial

To deliver this cutting-edge solution, Relatial leverages CHILI GraFx as our embedded editor. This powerful technology allows us to offer a robust, user-friendly interface that brings our smart template concept to life.

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Conclusion

Relatial isn't just another design tool – it's a paradigm shift in how we approach brand consistency and design guidelines. By embedding rules directly into smart templates and leveraging intelligent actions, we empower organizations to maintain perfect brand consistency while unleashing creativity across their entire team.

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Interested in seeing how Relatial can transform your brand's marketing efforts? We're always open to providing a personalized demo. Contact us today to see how your templates could look and function within the Relatial ecosystem. Experience first hand how we're revolutionizing the world of design guidelines and brand management.