One of my primary duties while at JDK was the design and maintenance of all Xbox brand guidelines, associated templates, and branding assets.

This included:
Xbox Brand Guidelines
Xbox One Brand Guidelines
Xbox 360 Brand Guidelines
Xbox Live Brand Guidelines
Xbox 360 Game Advertising Guidelines
Xbox One Game Advertising Guidelines
Xbox Entertainment Studios Guidelines
Xbox Entertainment Partner Guidelines
All assets and templates for the above

As much of Xbox’s branding appears in collaboration with game and media production companies, various retailers, magazines, websites, and other partner brands, their branding has to work with a large variety of different layouts and is not produced by them in-house. This leads to many challenges when it comes to brand consistency and makes having a bulletproof set of branding guidelines, a template library, and a collection of branded assets vital. It also meant that these guidelines and collection of assets had to work for a large variety of use cases as well as account for and adapt to unforeseen brand needs.

Prior to the release of Xbox One, this was accomplished through a single brand guideline document. A brand bible that had ballooned to a massively unwieldy size and page count and that arguably was not serving its purpose well. Add to this the addition of now multiple consoles, branded events, services, and owned studios; Xbox was becoming a branded house with parent and child brands. Serving all the information on the entire brand system to anyone who needed a few pieces of guidance did not make sense. The solution was simple: a set of tailored guidelines that would address a single brand under the Xbox umbrella or a specific user group that needed tailored information. This solution also allowed for better control and dissemination of confidential information. Again, much of Xbox’s consumer-facing brand would not be created in-house; these guidelines also formed the basis for the visual direction and appearance of all Xbox-branded media seen in retail, print, video, and on the web.

To highlight just a few key benefits:
• Reduced instances of users requesting clarity from the brand team.
• Better dissemination of confidential information
• Lowered page counts and more easily understood guidance
• More negative space and clear hierarchy