FedEx Brand Identity Quick Reference Guide is a nice little PDF covering the most basic of brand guideline advice for the FedEx range of logos.

What I do find most interesting is finally being able to nail down what version of red, blue—I mean purple—are the official FedEx colours.

K Download FedEx Brand Identity Quick Reference Guide

Been meaning to do a nice little post on the CN logo by Allan Fleming as it’s close to being one of the most prestigious of brand marks ever. Since my previous post on the British Steel logo designed by David Gentlemen I became more inspired, and motivated, to do my own CN logo post.

My plan was to try and find alternative imagery for the CN logo as I know many websites have already covered, mentioned and referenced the CN logo. In my search over the last few days I have come across some fine websites that have done a great job of cataloguing the CN logo in a similar way to what I had planned myself.

This post will include some of the imagery and appropriate back-links to the originating website.

Hope you enjoy.

Allan Fleming (left) with Charles Harris at the launch of the CN logo in 1960.

CN Logo Resource Credits

The most notable of these websites that I viewed is The Canadia Design Resource which first posted details on the CN logo & brand back in 2006.

A detailed history on how the CN logo came to be can be read over at a rather tired looking About the 1960 CN logo. Although not a pretty web page by todays standards the information contained will provide you with all you need to know about the CN logo. It’s a must read.

One of the more comprehensive websites that has covered the CN logo in detail is DesignKultur: Tracing the Evolution of the CN Logo : 50th Anniversary 1960–2010

The Centre for Contemporary Canadian Art holds a number of photographs and scans of Allan Fleming’s work for CN, and some of these images I have used in this post. If you navigate to Resources and then do a keyword search for Allan Fleming…

The gorgeous photographs of the CN train towards the end of this post can be obtained by visiting the official CN website and navigating to their Image Gallery where you can download very high resolution photographs.

Allan Fleming standing in front of a CN boxcart.

About the 1969 CN Logo

The following select paragraphs are just a few I have lifted from About the 1960 CN logo.

Allan Fleming’s CN Sketches

The following images charts the progress of Allans idea process showing just how wild logo sketching can be.

From these early sketches iconic logos arise.

CN Logo Flickr Set

Nice little selection of old and new CN related photographs, including the old Canadian National Railways logo below.

Official CN Photography Library

Visit the CN website and navigating to their Image Gallery where you can download very high resolution photographs.

The CN Logo & Brand Guidelines

To wrap up here are the CN Logo & Brand Identity Guidelines which you can download as a PDF.

It can be all to easy to assume that style guides are only for logo’s and identities, but as Anna Debenham points out over on 24Ways.org—this is an excellent website that runs for the first 24 days of December with web based guest articles on all manor of web themed topics—that many websites may require, or would benefit from, a detailed front-end style guide.

Detailed and complex identity projects usually benefit from an identity style guide; this is to ensure that anyone who might be hands-on with the identity can ensure that their creative input is consistent, and within the scope of the original brand design.

So given the often detailed and complex CSS style structures of many websites it then makes sense that a front-end style guide is also created. This would be to ensure that any further application of the website design is within a pre-defined style.

No ones likes to see anything they have helped create suffer at the hands of people who don’t have these guidelines to follow. If you care about how your work is handled when you are not there to supervise then creating a one of these front-end style guides will be a huge blessing.

Read the original article over on Front-end Style Guides

If you enjoy looking through brand identity guidelines then you will likely find this post useful: Bulging Sack of Brand Identity Guideline Resources

Ever since laying eyes on Evernote I have been a huge admirer of the logo design. The particular shape of the elephant with the folded back ear reminiscent of a document icon, or a folded page in a book, oozed brandability. 

It’s actually right up there as one of my favourite logos of all time. That might surprise a few of you, but I always felt that this was a perfect mix of style, colour, detail and meaning as well as being totally flexible in it’s universal application.

The Evernote logo is a perfect example of everything done right to cater for many possible variations of physical and digital requirements. There is not one application I have seen where the logo fails to fit perfectly all the way from the 16px favicon, the browser extension icons in both colour and mono, the iOS icons, Macintosh dock icon and so on and so on.

The Evernote logo is also a perfect example of a mainstream online brand identity to study.

Since starting LogoStack I have been curious to find out the origins of the Evernote logo, and for a while kept drawing a blank on who/whom was responsible.

Then today the answer was given to me by a few people due to a relatively recent Evernote Trunk Conference Youtube video, uploaded September 2011.

So thanks to ElephantChannel for the tweet that put me in exactly the right spot to get all the information I needed.

Icon to Interface – Evernote Trunk Conference

In this post I have added a few images which I grabbed from the following YouTube video which I would strongly urge you to watch in it’s entirety.

It’s close to 45 minutes long and covers the initial scope of logo ideas, in-depth reasoning, logical and practical considerations of implementing the Evernote logo/icon across the entire brand identity.

For any one interested or actually works on logo and icon projects targeted towards web applications and mobile devices then this is a must see. If you also want to get a behind-the-scenes run down of the creative process of such an iconic brand then this is it.

In the video we find out who lead the creative team responsible for the logos creations which is Gabe Campodonico, Creative Director at Evernote. In this instance Evernote’s brand identity was totally created in-house.

I watched it this afternoon and will be returning back to watch it again as some of the pointers are simple, common sense thoughts yet that can be often forgotten.

Watching this video is a nice kick up the ass to not forgot the simple stuff that can make or break a project.

You get to see some of the initial logo ideas and explorations.

Then once Evernote settled on the core idea of an Elephant you get to see the variations they considered before settling on the final choice.

As well as a run through on the importance of owning a colour and style so that it shines above the many other applications and icons.

An interesting snip of information is that the creative team took just 6 weeks form start to finished logo design which is really quite incredible.

I am so genuinely pleased to have finally discovered the origins of the Evernote logo, and after watching the video have walked away with more than a few pointers and reminders about the creation and origination of solid logo and icon designs.

If you like all things brand identity then I have quite a meaty collection of guidelines and resources you might like: Bulging Sack of Brand Identity Guideline Resources 

Evernote Brand Guidelines

To finish this post up Evernote has a nice section on their website, Evernote Trademark Use, which details all the technical and legal information regarding the use and referencing of core aspects of Evernote’s visual brand identity.

Download the Evernote Brand Guidelines

I love me some Brand Identity Guideline Resources and you will see that in the past I have featured a variety of such brand book guidelines covering: 

• Skype
• I Love New York
• FourSquare
• Adobe
• Sony Vaio
• CISCO
• Santa Claus
• The Nazis 
• NASA (part 1 & part 2)

I keep searching for other prime examples of branding books, corporate guidelines, identity guides, and through out these searches I often stumble across some nice examples, but not examples that provide the WOW factor.

The WOW factor is more of personal opinion rather than a scientific method of assessing WOW from NON-WOW, but usually based on what I also feel other people will take note of.

The Bulging Sack of Brand Identity Guideline Resources is a collection of branding and identity guidelines resources that I have collected over time that will hopefully keep you busy for a short while. A few are a few years old, and you have likely seen around, but I also think a few could be new to you.

Massive thanks to Sasha Agapov @agapov for reaching out to me, and sending me CISCO, Best Buy and Ford brand guideline.

Bulging Sack of Brand Guideline Resources

The Oxfam Brand Book

Download The Oxfam Brand Guidelines

The Jamie Oliver Brand Book

Download Jamie Oliver Brand Guidelines Book

New York City Transit Authority Graphics Manual

View more photos of the New York City Transit Authority Graphics Manual
Found via Swiss Legacy

The Best Buy Brand Book

Download the Best Buy Brand Guidelines

The Ford Brand Book

Download the Best Buy Brand Guidelines

The Barbican Brand Guidelines

Download The Barbican Brand Guidelines
Found via AisleOne

The FearNet Brand Book

Download The FearNet Brand Book

The Easy Group Brand Manual

Download The easyGroup Brand Manual
Found via LogoDesignLove

Apple Identity Guidelines

Download Apple Identity Guidelines

The BBC GEL Styleguide

Download the BBC GEL Style Guide

Seagate Corporate Style Guide

Download the Seagate Corporate Style Guide

Vintage McDonalds Specification Manual

View more on Vintage McDonalds Specification Manual

The Propellerhead Brand Manual

Download the Propellerhead Brand Manual

The F-Secure Brand Identity Guidelines

Download the F-Secure Brand Identity Guidelines

The Skittles Brand Book

Download the Skittles Brand Book
Found via Couldal

Other Brand Guideline Resources

So as well as all those don’t forget I have featured the following brands on imjustcreative: Skype, I Love New York, FourSquare, Adobe, Sony Vaio, CISCO, Santa Claus, The Nazis and even Vintage NASA (part 1 & part 2).

Buy a Brand Book?

If you have some spare dosh you could head over to Blanka and buy some printed brand books with brands such as First Direct, Barbican and RAC.

Brand Guideline Links

Designing Style Guidelines For Brands And Websites - Smashing Magazine

Guidelines And Standards Manuals - IdentityWorks

Brand Identity – Computer Arts

List of Corporate Brand Guidelines – DesignersTalk

Single Page Logo Guideline Template – imjustcreative

Four Page Logo Guideline Template – imjustcreative

Online Brand Guidelines

Some companies don’t feel the need to create a brand book and so create a simpler online version. Penguin Logo Guidelines is one such example.

Brand Guideline Books

These are a few books on brand identity that I can highly recommend after having read them myself.

Book Overview: Brand Identity Essentials by Rockport

Logo Design Love by David Airey

Designing Brand Identity byAlina Wheeler

Wally Olins: The Brand Handbook by Wally Olins

On B®and by Wally Olins

The New Guide to Identity by Wolff Olins

Bonus Branding Book

The Pepsi brand book is really good for a giggle. Have to wonder what planet the design team/person was on when this was conceptualised, but regardless of home planet they certainly have a wicked sense of humour. Practical joke time.

Download the Pepsi Brand Book

View high resolution version of the Carl Zeiss Jenna Logo Specification Sheet on Flickr.

After spending some time recreating the Vintage VW Logo Specification sheet I got all hot and horny for these classic logo specifications, but finding more has proved to be fruitless until now. After glancing through one of my logo books for reference and inspiration a whole page image of the Vintage Carl Zeiss Jenna logo specification sheet stared back at me.

Clearly only one thing I could do at this point.

By the way the book in question is Marks of Excellence by Per Mollerup—as a side note I would highly recommend getting this book for your logo design book collection—and the Carl Zeiss Jenna image can be found on page 180.

I initially took a quick photo with my iPhone and did a Google image search to see if the image was referenced anywhere online, but nothing at all showed up. I also did some searches for “Carl Zeiss Jenna logo specification”, “Carl Zeiss Jenna logos” etc which didn’t result in anything appropriate for this little project.

You can see the original Carl Zeiss Jenna logo being used on products: Zeiss Corporate History

During the search I did manage to find this nice Carl Zeiss Jenna logo history sheet, below,which shows how the logo has changed very little over the years with the notable change in name to Zeiss Ikon, and is now just called Zeiss.

After trying to locate an online source for the Carl Zeiss Jenna logo, and not having any luck, the only other option was to photograph the page from the book which is what you see above. There was some tight cropping done on the book version which meant some of the imagery like the logo and table information were cut off so I did take a small liberty to recreate these lost little bits on all 4 sides.

The next step, when I have some time, is to recreate this sheet just as I did with the Vintage VW Logo Specification sheet. I can see this taking considerably longer due to the handwritten nature of the text and other hand drawn details, but this will be a nice little project to further the digital life of this bit of brand history before it all gets lost in the ether.

If anyone can provide further details on who originally designed the Carl Zeiss Jenna logo then I would be very grateful. I have done some cursory searches on Google and Wikipedia, but nothing is obviously popping up. Would be great to be able to assign proper designer credits to this.

To wrap up this is how we now know the original Carl Zeiss Jenna brand…

I was chuffed when I found the Adobe Brand Identity Book a little while back, but am more chuffed on getting my hands on The Cisco Brand Identity Book and Guidelines.

Massive thanks to Sasha Agapov @agapov for reaching out to me, and sending me these Cisco brand guidelines, and a few other brand books my way.

Once you check out the following images you will see exactly why I am really pleased to have these Cisco guidelines land on my desk. In terms of design and aesthetics, structure and layout the Cisco guidelines have to be one of the greatest set of brand guidelines I have seen recently, and comes close to trumping the Adobe Brand Book.

This set of Cisco guidelines were put together late 2010 so must be the most recent version?

Everything about these guidelines is bordering on the perfect, and certainly appeals to my overall sense of design and layout. Every section is clearly presented with attention to the details that really make it stand out. It’s fresh and lively without being too bland and conservative like the Sony Vaio brand book I covered recently.

The Cisco brand book is the complete opposite of the Sony Vaio guidelines. They show how capturing and presenting key valuable components of a brands identity can be done in a way that is a joy to read as well as being totally practical at the same time.

These guidelines are what I will strive to aim for in terms of layout and the presentation of information. I have found it quite difficult in limiting the pages to include in this post as so many of them are pretty good on the eyes, and keep going back to the pages for closer inspection.

The colour pages are particularly wonderful as is how one should use colours and gradients when working with the Cisco brand. Beautiful. You can download the 75 page PDF below.

View Other Brand Identity Guidelines

You can see other brand identity books that I have collected over time right here: Skype, I Love New York, FourSquare, Adobe, Sony Vaio (how not to design guidelines) and even vintage NASA (part 1 & part 2).

Download the The Cisco Brand Identity Book and Guidelines

The Sony Vaio Brand Identity Book & Guidelines has actually disappointed me a great deal. Before I downloaded the PDF I had envisaged a visual delight of branding do’s and don’t, but instead it feels really rather dull, uninspiring, awkward and poorly designed.

I totally get that designing and creating these guidelines is a hugely complex and time consuming task that brands such as Adobe, Skype, I Love New York, FourSquare and even vintage NASA (part 1 & part 2) can demonstrate.

Previous examples of branding guidelines have typically been created with care, passion, attention to detail as well as the realisation that the brand guidelines also represent the brand that the brand book is attempting to keep on the straight and narrow.

When a stunning laptop such as the Sony Vaio has a brand book that looks as tired as this one does it really is a shame. Adobe had a monumental task on their hands with their brand book given how many sub brands, applications, icons, logos, logo types are in use at any one time yet they still have taken care with the overall presentation of this valuable book.

The best pages are the colour specifications only because of the lovely range of blues neatly laid out on the page.

The most interesting aspect of the Sony Vaio brand is the meaning behind the Sony Vaio logo. As it happens I have a post about that as well: The Meaning Behind the Sony Vaio Logo

Maybe I have been spoilt with some stunning previous brand guidelines and need to look past the layout, and focus more on the presented information? Yet—I still come back to thinking—the presentation is just as important as the information when you are talking about brand guidelines? Or not.

Download the PDF of the Sony Vaio Brand Identity Book & Guidelines

A while back Tim George was fortunate enough to get his hands on a few pages of the NASA Brand Identity Guidelines from 1976 and put them up on his website. The result post spawned a gazillion reposts, including here on imjustcreative, and back links for Tim, but frustratingly only a handful of pages which left us all wanting more.

Tim has now managed to get his hands on a few more pages of NASA Brand Identity Guidelines—which is not an original copy, but a photocopied duplicate—and has kindly scanned these in as well. I’m only going to show a few photos as it’s only right that Tim gets the viewings and page visits for his work in making this available to us.

The NASA identity was designed by Danne & Blackburn in 1976 and has to be without a shadow of a doubt one of the most iconic examples of logo and identity design. It’s a real treat to see more pages of the NASA Brand Identity Guidelines.

I have other well known brand identity guidelines littered about my blog which you can find using the Identity Guidelines category.

NASA Brand Identity Guidelines

Head over to Tim’s Flickr set as well as his website for a written explanation: NASA Brand Identity Guidelines / Danne and Blackburn, 1976 of how he managed to get his hands on such a beauty.

This vintage 1970′s McDonaldland Brand Specification Manual, or style guide, has nothing to do with logos, but all to do with creating and presenting consistency. The manual was presented to licensees to help create McDonaldland-licensed items.

This is a winning find with all credit goes Jason Liebig for scanning in the brand manual, and displaying in his McDonald’s Flickr set. I found this via Retronaut.

To see all images at full-size, then either visit Retronaut all Jason’s McDonald’s Flickr set.

Skype Brand Identity Book and Guidelines are another example of corporate identities done right. Some argue that this set of guidelines could have easily been condensed to much less than the 39 pages. That may be so, but I agree with the practice of spacing out each specific area of the brand identity.

Brand guidelines need to be easy to read and understand, with a focus on clarity and presentation, when there are many multiple parts of the overall brand to present in one publication.

I personally think that the Skype brand book is bordering on aesthetic and practical perfection.

These brand guidelines are a few years old now so unclear as to the accuracy of this particular version, but it still gives you a very detailed view of how companies like Skype value how their brand is viewed, perceived as well as presented.

It’s hard to find companies willing to make their brand guidelines openly accessible like Skype, I Love New York, FourSquare and even NASA.

Download Skype Brand Identity Book and Guidelines

Another Skype Brand Book

There is another version of the Skype brand guidelines which you can download which are considerably different in tone and style. I personally don’t like this version as it tries to be cool and funny.

Download Skype Brandbook

The I Love New York logo, designed by Milton Glaser, is right up there with there with the best of them; nothing quite like it exists in capturing the hearts and minds of native New Yorkers and visitors alike. This is a true iconic brand image.

As Wikipedia puts it:

I Love New York is both a logo and a song that are the basis of an advertising campaign and have been used since the mid-1970s to promote tourism in New York City,^[1] and later to promote New York State as well. The trademarked logo appears in souvenir shops and brochures throughout the state, some licensed, many not. The song is the state song of New York.

I Love New York Brand Guidelines

With the I Love New York logo brand identity guidelines you can see exactly how the logo is applied from magazines, print adverts, TV, merchandise etc.

These branding guidelines are really cleanly laid out—one of the nicest brand guidelines I have seen in some time—with lots of attention clearly paid to the overall aesthetics and presentation of the logo as well as its various applications. Certainly worth picking up a few pointers here if you are looking to create some branding guidelines of your own.

You can view the entire 50 page document over on Scribd.

I decided to do a faithful recreation of this for which you can now download and print out as a poster. There are also a few desktop wallpapers, and an iPhone 4 wallpaper.

Finds like this really make my day; one sheet showing an aged logo specification sheet for the VW logo found on Tumblr via http://iamkhayyam.tumblr.com. All I need now it to see the rest of it so if anyone has an idea on where more of the Vintage VW Logo Specifications then do let me know.

In the meantime here are a few images to some more recent VW brand identity guidelines which don’t look nearly as cool. Not that brand guidelines always need to look cool, but you know what I mean.

Doesn’t get much better than this. Imagine being able to say you own the complete NASA branding book created by design firm Danne & Blackburn in 1975.

Once something like this surfaces then you can be sure if will end up doing the internet rounds, and these NASA brand guidelines are no exception.

So we have pinned down the single page images to one Tim George who lives resides in London. One of his ex-tutors from college is the proud owner of the original NASA graphics standards manual, and sent Tim some of the photocopied pages.

I have particularly chuckled at the car illustrations.

Link Credits

NASA Brand Guidelines – Tim George Design

First image found on Logobird & AileOne

One can find some pretty sweet things on Tumblr, and this FourSquare BrandBook, or identity guidelines, is one of those sweet finds.

Initially posted on Mari Sheibley’s Tumblr where she goes onto to explain that FourSquare is her employer. This Tumblr post was subsequently reblogged by LaughingSquid which is where I noticed it in my Tumblr dashboard stream.

Visit PlayFourSquare to view the complete BrandBook.