The truth is establishing formal Brand Guidelines wasn't necessarily comfortable, for Hacker Noon, as a company.
I guess our team is kinda Calvinistic, in that sense: we don't like to talk about ourselves or our processes too much; we don't like to admit we like it when things look neat and pretty; and we didn't really anticipate scaling to the point where such large-scale documentation projects would be required, this fast.
Alas: here we are, having finally launched a formal Hacker Noon Brand Guidelines vibe — only six years since the company was founded (!) — and, in this article, I'll be taking the opportunity to share a little bit about:
- Why I Still Believe in the Necessity and Brilliance of Formal Brand Guidelines;
- How to Know When It's Time to Establish Brand Guidelines; and
- How Hacker Noon's New Brand Guidelines Benefit Contributors, Readers, and Brands.
Why I Still Believe Brand Guidelines Matter
“Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively.” ― The Dalai Lama
Brand Guidelines act as a framework you can use to:
- Save time for your Sales, Marketing, Community, and Product Teams by eliminating decision-making around brand typography, tone, colors, or logo usage, for example.
- Educate your users, superfans, and wannabes on correct usage to avoid potentially damaging misrepresentations and/or imitations of your brand online.
- Establish a recognizable and distinctive sensory experience for your community, clients and prospects amidst the amorphous mass of noise inhabiting planet internet.
- Create one massive content asset you can atomize and repurpose for multiple formats — from blogs and social posts to email newsletters, press releases, and podcast debates.
- Assure the brands and businesses you work with that their brand will be treated with the same careful consideration you dedicate to your own.
Why Now for Hacker Noon's First-Ever Brand Guidelines?
Startups often spend weeks agonizing over brand.
Thankfully, that's not how things went down when Hacker Noon was founded.
After Tom Snow and David Smooke settled on a monochromatic palette of terminal green and added a pixelated, charcoal-colored clock to represent both our name and tagline — how hackers start their afternoons — it was all systems go.
That, my friends, was a very long time ago.
Six years, to be exact.
Hacker Noon has since evolved from simply being the best place for professionals and startups to read, learn, and publish about technology content to also being:
- a software company,
- a global community,
- a place to monetize your content,
- a place where you can earn cash taking calls from people who stan your content,
- the best place to catch up on news from around the web about tech startups and giants,
- a regular tech news podcast,
- a certified brand presence in the online publishing industry... and so much more.
We may've started building from the bottom but now, we have official Hacker Noon help and support documentation, so. 🙌
Oh, and the size of our team grew by 60% last month.
As is to be expected: new people ask a lot of old questions.
We hope this Hacker Noon Brand Kit will be a resource new hires can use to move fast and break things. 🤞
5 Reasons Hacker Noon's New Brand Guidelines Are Good News for You Too
1. Grab all our open sourced awesomeness — in one place: download the Official Hacker Noon font, custom pixelated social media icons, pixelated site icons, and pixelated emoji reactions.
2. Access free, public Hacker Noon Canva templates you can use to promote your Hacker Noon stories / podcasts / homepage features on social media.
3. Get an overview of what it looks to work with Hacker Noon as a brand, business, or startup.
4. Discover the simple Voice, Tone, and Copywriting Principles behind Hacker Noon's most tweetable headlines and emails.Get an overview of what it looks to work with Hacker Noon as a brand, business, or startup.
5. See the full list of places you can find, follow, and tag Hacker Noon online to supercharge the social distribution of your tech stories and/or to ensure you never miss another top tech story.
🔖 Here's the Hacker Noon Brand Guidelines URL you'll wanna bookmark.
Special shoutouts to Kien Dao and Richard Kubina for their great work on bringing Hacker Noon's first brand kit to life — we hope it'll be a useful resource our ever expanding community of contributors and collaborators! 💚
🔗 Gain access to the Weekly Tech Brief, Story Submission Portal, and Evergreen Program for Business when you create your free Hacker Noon account today.