Project
Affiliate Branding Manual
Affiliate Branding Manual
Project Overview
Role: Lead Designer & UX for Brand Systems
Team: Digital Team | Use of Name Committee | Chief Communications Officer
Timeline: 2024 – 2025
Tools: Adobe Creative Suite, ISSUU
Problem
Harvard Medical School has formal affiliation agreements with fifteen hospitals, but there were no clear, centralized guidelines for how the HMS brand should be applied. This has led to confusion around logo usage and approvals, leading to frequent discussions and requests from affiliates. Without clear rules and guidance, the affiliates have used HMS branding incorrectly in multiple applications.
Users
Affiliate hospital marketing and communication teams
HMS communications team, Use of Name committee
External vendors producing licensed branded materials
Challenges
Creating guidelines without any existing documentation or standards to reference
Defining clear rules and edge cases for brand usage across a wide range of materials and formats
Designing information hierarchy for users to quickly find rules relevant to their use cases
Ensuring the manual can be easily understood by marketing teams, communication teams, administrators, and external vendors
Process
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I began by meeting with the Institutional Identity & Policy Manager to understand current issues found with affiliate brand usage and relationship with Harvard Medical School’s brand identity. Discussed the most common questions and errors appearing in materials. Since there were no prior guidelines, these conversations helped define critical rules and clarity.
I also reviewed existing affiliate materials to identify inconsistencies, misuses of logos, and unclear branding layouts. This discovery process helped establish a baseline of how to tackle found problems the manual needed to address.
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I worked to define:
approved and unapproved logo usage
logo placement and spacing rules
common application rules and regulations (print, digital, SWAG, event materials)
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With the defining rules complete, I focused on organizing the manual into a clear structure. It was important to group content by usage of logos on different materials listed in the table of contents for quick navigation.
Created an outline to test hierarchy in section labeling to ensure users could locate:
general information of affiliate logos
how to apply branding correctly on different mediums
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Once the information architecture & structure was reviewed with key stakeholders, I designed a manual template that supported:
consistent layout design
importance of critical rules and regulations with supporting visuals
overall design that supports the HMS brand
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Drafts of the manual were reviewed by the Institutional Identity & Policy Manager, Chief of Communications, and key members of the fifteen affiliates. Feedback was incorporated to clarify rules and guidance.
Final layout was distributed, with an emphasis on long-term usability and future updates.
Outcomes
The new Affiliate Branding Manual provides affiliated hospitals with clear guidance when using and applying Harvard Medical School branding correctly across digital and print materials. By organizing rules and guidelines and pairing real use cases with visuals, the manual reduced ambiguity and helped prevent brand misapplications.
