Brewery Media and Brand Kits for your Website

Take control of your brewery brand through media and brand kits

One area that I see lacking on a lot of brewery websites is easily accessible branding and media kits. I think we all hope that your brewery will be getting press coverage and promoted through other events or partnerships. My bet is that you are, to some extent, being promoted in ways that you don’t have total control over.

Let’s say your brewery is partnering with organization “XYZ” to provide beer for their event. This can be a great way to promote your beers and brand, right? Well, your team is likely not designing the promotional graphics for XYZ’s event. So XYZ is going to take two approaches to start promoting this event with your brand associated with it.

Case 1: XYZ contacts you directly for your branding assets.

Case 2: XYZ searches the web for your logo and graphics (yikes!)

Case 1

Their staff hopefully has reached out to you to ask for print versions of your logo and branding. This is the ideal situation, but do you really want to regularly be fielding emails and providing logos and branding assets? I imagine you are busy making kick-ass beer and tending to business, as you should.

Case 2

When is the last time you did an image search to see how your logo and graphics are coming up? Even if you are getting good images pulling up first, are they print-ready? Are they outdated? Are they on transparent backgrounds and well suited for application on promotional materials? And heaven forbid they try to lift your logo from your website header to use on a poster. Website images are made for web and not for print.

Let’s wrangle this situation and make your life easier!

If you invest a bit of time upfront, you can take control of your brand in these situations and save yourself time down the road. Every brewery website should have a media and branding section on their website with easily accessible brand assets! The more you can provide on these sections on your website, the better, but here are some suggestions and samples!

What to include in your brand kits

Hopefully you have a good brand guideline and a brand asset package that includes logo files, colors, and how to use your brand. If you don’t, we should talk. What should you include in your media and branding kits for public use? Here are some great things to have available:

Logo files

• Print versions in all formats you have available (PDF, EPS, PNG, and JPG are common formats)
• Black and white versions of the logo (or dark and light). Various color versions if you have them.
• Web sized logo files (JPG, GIF, and PNG are common formats)
• Make sure that you have logo files available on transparent backgrounds

Brand Guidelines

• Joe Schmoe designer might smash your logo into a corner and squish it to fit between other graphics. We don’t want that. Upload your entire brand guideline book and make sure you let people know to use it!
• This should include your official colors and logo usage at the least.

Photography

• This is likely more for media coverage, but very good to have in any case.
• Brewery photographs. Exterior, interior, brewing space, merchandise, etc.
• Photos of the owners, or important team members
• Product shots. Photos of all your SKUs in various formats. Can, bottle, 4pk, 6pk, 12pk, in a glass, grouped together, etc.

Okay, so you have brand guidelines and brand assets ready to go, now we need to publish these on your website. Here are a few approaches you can take to get your brand assets ready to download from your website.

Dropbox for brand assets

I love Dropbox for many reasons. One reason is you can provide any sort of folder and file structure and the public can navigate these files with ease. So, create a Dropbox folder and start organizing your brand assets, and when you are done you can link to this from a media and branding page on your website! Easy, right?

This is one of the cheapest and easiest ways to get this accomplished. Dropbox has free accounts that will easily take care of this.

Sierra Nevada did a great job with organizing their photo assets and media kit information in clear and understandable folders. See it in action here

Brandfolder

Our good friends RadCraft turned us on to the option of using Brandfolder. RadCraft uses Brandfolder with their brewery clients to create some great media and branding kits. The nice thing about Brandfolder is that you are able to create collections, have the ability to search for assets, and also have the ability to tag assets to create more hierarchy and ease of use. Take a look at this sample from Funkwerks.

Funkwerks has a great collection of photos broken down into useful categories. See it in action here.

Your own website

You can take this on yourself and post them to your website. The nice thing about this approach is that you are able to have all your assets on your own platform and branded to your brewery. (Dropbox and Brandfolder are separate platforms, so you don’t have complete control of how it looks) Depending on your website, you can take various methods for posting all of your media and brand assets to a dedicated page.

There is one downside to going this route. Depending on your website or web support, it might be a bit of a pain to manage. If you are not savvy at managing your own website, then you might have to pay someone to help manage these assets. If you simply have a media and branding page that links out to Dropbox or Brandfolder, then you can easily update and manage those separately and not have to touch your site.

Deschutes Brewery takes this approach and provided a nice and simple option to download their logos and their brand guideline manual. See it in action here.

If you don’t have a brand guideline, brand colors, quality logo files, or product photography to post on your media and branding section of your website, Craft Brew Creative would be happy to discuss helping you out. If you need assistance with your website, or need a website to post your media kit to, we’re also ready to help out! Contact us here and we can connect!