Managing your brand is hard, but OpenBrand makes it easy

Startups need to treat their brand like a newborn baby, because a brand is how a company appears to the entire world, reflecting how it views itself in comparison to its market, customers and competitors. Your brand is essential to your success as a young company, and every time you screw it up, your image is taking a hit.

The problem is that maintaining brand identity and values requires tons of work and planning, plus reinforcing concepts to new employees and partners takes time and effort. There are so many details to keep track of, including a variety of logos, color schemes, typefaces, approved images, company attributes and values, among other finer points that often fall through the cracks. So what is your solution? A zip of all your assets?

OpenBrand is an online platform that helps companies and designers gather, organize and maintain everything they need to unite a brand. A fully fleshed out brand needs to track everything from hexadecimal color codes to print and web typography, and OpenBrand helps make this task much easier. OpenBrand also encourages new companies to develop a complete brand by serving as a checklist.

From OpenBrand:

Taking care of the business’ brand has either been partially outsourced or not done at all until now. OpenBrand can help you both to rationalize and streamline existing processes with agencies and creatives, and provide the tool for smaller companies to take better care of their own brands. It introduces a new approach to brand asset management at a very affordable cost.

Although the “Your Logo” balloon on the homepage nearly killed me, OpenBrand’s site is clean and well organized. It is minimal enough to stay out of the way, making it feel like it was developed just for your organization. The best part? OpenBrand is free for anyone to use as an identity tool. Monthly plans starting at $9 help you manage your “world of brand,” which basically includes all your real world implementations like business cards, leaflets, banner ads, etc.

Take a peak at OpenBrand and let us know what you think. You can try a live demo here. If you run a startup, how do you manage your brand? Is it a priority for you?

Check out this post on brand books from the best in the business for inspiration!