We needed to provide clarity to our internal teams as to why this effort was necessary, and reinforce the role of our agency as a whole, in the communities we support. Commerce has several units, each containing a varying number programs that total more than 100. We support local governments, energy, housing, business, homelessness and more. When you have this many programs, sometimes it is hard to remember that we all work for the same agency, striving for the same goal, strengthening our communities.

These guidelines help remind us who we are and who we help support. They also keep us honest, and continually drive us to be consistent in our messaging and collateral, regardless if we are speaking with the legislative branch or the organizations that we support or give guidance to. 

From our desktop screensaver to our public facing website, our goal is to continually iterate as we go, in order to keep improving. Our website is currently in a four phase update process, where phase one, a brand color and font face lift, along with a few UX modifications and some minor cleanup, is complete. With three more phases to go in this release cycle we are looking forward to evaluating technology, organizing content and page structure, to usability and template builds in order to help create a space where different programs can release new information on their own.

Working with our email delivery system (GovDelivery) we have standardized our email communications both for internal and external digital communications. Although email systems are a bit more constrained due to email clients, using standard system fonts along side our brand colors and optimistic photography choices help us continue to build our brand and stay consistent.

With so many programs needing to get their message out, and such a small communications team, we needed to develop tools that would allow individuals to build their now reports and collateral without coming to our team every time they needed something. Word allows you to build templates and include your brand fonts and colors as well as lock down typography styles which provide a consistent look and feel regardless of which programs is creating it.

Our agency gives presentations to our state legislators, local governments and various organizations. A basic set of master slides that align with our visual brand help set the stage for our teams to work together and build a presentation that feels like it came from one team and one agency.