And here are the categories of blog posts we eventually settled on:

• “Generic Photography” Blog Posts
  These are blog posts that don’t fall into any of the other categories and will probably make up the majority of the posts. We tried to go mostly with images only (no tagline or title in the actual image), letting striking images speak for itself. Occasionally we’d have a title, but instead of putting on the title (that would be in the supporting text on social), instead, we try to ask a question that worked well with the final title. We’ll come up with a standard placement for all of the elements, but sometimes an image may not cooperate and we (sparingly) have to move the elements around. We always have our logo and tagline on the image. The photography we use should be authentic and not look like it’s photoshopped or composited. Instead, in that case we go more of an illustrative route.

•  “Partnership” Blog Posts
  We present our partner first (left) on a gradient background. Logos are in white. Logo sizes are visually equal (meaning they may not be the same height or width but look like they both have the same prominence.

• “Screenshot”, “Dashboard”, or “Charts and Graphs” Blog Posts
  We want to make sure the screenshots and dashboards aren’t completely covered up and don’t get in the way of logo or text.

• “Product Releases”, “Awards”, “eBooks”, “Case Studies”, “In the Media”, “Company News”, and “Careers” Blog Posts
  A small amount of text with a large impact for something big.

• “Generic Digital Vector Illustration” Blog Posts
  Same rules as above for the “photography posts.” But the background is always muted grays and purples with small objects having regular colors, people are always wearing ControlUp main three colors, hair is always brand purple. We pick an illustrator that has a lot of images available on the sites we get artwork from and always use that artist so we have visual consistency in our illustrations. We are going to shy away from icons as they don’t give a lot of context as a blog post hero image. Reserve them for the website and inside our digital product.

• “Specials (1, 2, 3 part series)” Blog Posts
  When there’s a multi-post series.

• “Quote” Blog Posts
  If it’s from someone in another company, how do we want to deal with the ControlUp logo? 

• “Podcasts” Blog Posts
  ControlUp has a couple of blog posts, and a few individuals in the company also had their own industry blog posts being published under the ControlUp umbrella. These were so numerous that we had to get too specific with them, but they needed to be branded. 

• “Videos” Blog Posts
  If the post was only a video, rarely did we create a separate blog post. With today’s technology, posting videos directly into social media is really much more effective. But every once in a while there is a special circumstance and with video becoming much more common, we decided to tackle this now. But the solution was actually quite simple. We simply put the universal “triangle in a circle” play button on top of a still image.

• “Community” and “Academy” Blog Posts
  There are two departments of ControlUp that also have separate blog posts. The first deals with the people who use the products on a daily basis. The second deals with any learning and education surrounding the product. We had to find a way to include them in the list, but still make sure their sub-brands shone through. 

• “Press Releases”, “Events”, “One-offs”, and “Special Circumstances” Blog Posts
  These were items that quite frequently havespecial situations or demands that need to be off brand or have a different sort of impact. Press releases are an important part of the company and usually were released as a separate blog post a week after the release made its way into the world. Events usually need to be branded with the event branding, and occasionally there are world event happenings that need a special call out. Wildcards that got determined at the time of need.

So to start things out, the Director of Marketing and myself did a little research. He asked the questions of the c-level employees, and I went out and did on-line research, and reviewed blog posts of a wide variety of companies, both large and small. We both had our opinions on the subject, but wanted to make sure we weren’t off the rails on them. So after a week of noodling on the subject we came up with the following:

• The logo should be on the hero image. It wasn’t on many of the pieces we saw out in the real world, and we knew that many of the images would be reposted on personal blogs, used in PowerPoint decks, and other places out in the wild. So we wanted to make sure ControlUp was being shown.

• The tagline. Neither the director nor myself were involved in the tagline chosen. The agency that was working on that was put into motion well before either of us arrived at ControlUp and at this point, with the tagline being completed just a month or so before, throwing our opinions into the mix wouldn’t do anything worthwhile except slow things down. 

• Branding. We needed each and every blog hero to be branded even above having our logo and tagline in it. For reference, a  very simplistic view of our branding consists of our four colors (Bright Pink, Orange, a Rich Yellow, and Purple), a gradient from three of them (excluding purple), and the shape of a hexagon.

So I came up with three designs for blog posts. I called them Smooth, Edge, and Bold.

• Smooth

  • This look draws from the gradient side of our branding

  • Pictures are being give an eye-popping gradient makeover

  • Large swathes of gradients are used as backgrounds

  • Subtle hints of gradient are used to good effect

• Edge

  • This theme comes out of the sunnier side of out branding colors

  • Straight lines are used to delineate information effectively

  • Has a modern vibe with a little bit of retro flair as our gradient has been transformed into solid blocks of color

• Bold

  • Hexagons are where it’s at, taking a nod from that side of our current style guide

  • You see these shapes everywhere, big and bold, to subtle and ghosted in the background, or some novel usage for a bespoke feel

  • Color is subtly the star of the show