ClearForm Company and Product Overview by James KNoll

John Scrugham Maxine Hepfer Version 1.0 March 29, 2011

Table of Contents Organizational Plan ..................................................................................................................................... 3 Our Brand .................................................................................................................................................. 3 Strategy ..................................................................................................................................................... 4 Products and Services .............................................................................................................................. 5 Operations ............................................................................................................................................... 11 Administrative Plan ................................................................................................................................. 15 The Marketing Plan ................................................................................................................................... 15 Market Analysis ....................................................................................................................................... 15 Competition ............................................................................................................................................. 15 Marketing Strategy .................................................................................................................................. 15 Customer Service .................................................................................................................................... 16 Financial Documents ................................................................................................................................ 17 Examples Style Guide ............................................................................................................................................... .I The Pines ................................................................................................................................................. II

Organizational Plan You will find a summary of our businessâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; both the company and our core product.

Organizational Plan ClearForm is a hospitality-specific company that offers a service to firms to enhance their brand image and communication efficiency through effective document distribution and design. Our brand, our products and services, and our administrative plan drives the overarching organizational plan of ClearForm.

Our Brand ClearForm is a business-minded firm that understands design. Because we are both artistic in design and practical in business, our products offer a medium point in graphics that *meets at the best of both world* In addition, our personalities reflect the same mindset of our products. We are able to conduct business— we come sharp to meetings—but we don’t have to be high profile, high stressed work machines all the time.

Vision Because we currently only offer one product, we have limited our vision to the degree of that product. While we may be limiting our scope, we are not limiting the potential of our product. Our vision is to provide the most robust publication templates to hospitality firms.

Values Our values align with the business side of our business model—we see design and art as modes to help propel our functional business design contrasting many graphic design firms that will state “freedom” and “self-expression” as values. Our employees hold our values close as they design graphics, templates, and information systems in an attempt to elicit the same values in our clients: Productive Hospitality: We do things as productive as possible in all things that we do. From our organizational management tools to the way we interact with our clients, we are productive, yet provide a hospitality service—efficiency with a human touch. Smart Thinking: Our employees work to think smart. Creating documents that are designed effectively for our clients—as well as their audiences—takes smarts, yet we ask for thinking as well. Smart thinking is not only intelligence but general street smarts as well. Clear Business: We work to make all communication clear. Through effectively designed documents, internal communication systems, and well thought out paragraphs, we aim to make what we want to say what we say. That is, we clear business operates through

Mission We have two missions: To empower our clients to communicate effectively through business-guided and visually-appealing documents and To eliminate organization waste—time and effort—through well-built information systems. We find pride in helping our clients produce something that they are proud of—teaching and leading are fundamental aspects to our first mission. As a result our first mission, we hope to eliminate organizational waste which will ultimately increase the organizations ROI. To convince clients to choose our product, we highlight the ROI aspect of our mission, but as we work with them, we hope to convey the passion of empowerment that we give each employee who has access to the documents.

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Strategy We will use the following strategies to build a solid company.

The Competitive Strategy ClearForm uses its unique product offering as a competitive strategy. Graphic Designers who know business: We are not just graphic designers; we are trained to make the design fit the professional guidelines of the hospitality firm. Business professionals who know design: We are not just business professionals; we are trained to make documents look pleasing to the eye and make the information in the document clear to the reader. Students who know the industry: We are students who are eager to gain experience in creating products for clients and have a vast set of resources at our disposal at the Cornell School of Hotel Administration.

SWOT Analysis Strengths We are fresh out of Business Computingâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;an intensive â&#x20AC;&#x153;trainingâ&#x20AC;? course on the service that we provide. We minimize costs by relying on existing training through the college. When companies realize the potential increase in productivity that comes from our product, we can gain quick support. Weakness We are young and inexperienced. SGH is partially a consulting company, and consultants are usually well worked within the industry that they are consulting for. Opportunities The increase of expectation for technology Threats Consultants understand that they need to offer the same product. They can then package it in and leave us out of making hospitality contacts.

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Products and Services A company’s documents often reside everywhere: in print, in a random department’s computer files, or at corporate headquarters. At a property level, documents are often made without brand standards and business standards in mind. ClearForm puts all the documents in one place for the property to access and makes sure that they adhere to a brand identity and function well as business documents. We combine the following to create this comprehensive product: Design: We create/revamp corporate brand identities through colors, images, logos, typography and other design choices that create a comprehensive and professional feel. Business Templates: We are trained in business writing and document design. Our knowledge helps us create document, presentation, and spreadsheet designs that not only adhere to business standards (correct headers, memo format) but also provide business value (such as high skim-value for easy readability). Distribution: Through our web application, we can easily distribute our templates for complete integration into the companies processes and buy-in with employees.

Design We create/revamp corporate brand identities through colors, images, logos, typography and other design choices that create a comprehensive and consistent feel. If that doesn’t sound like design to you, you’re on the right track. When most people think of a design firm, they think of odd fonts, crazy colors, and thickrimmed glasses. See images to the right for a visual explanation of designers. This is why we distinguish between that design and effective business design. Business Design When we refer to design, we mean that we are creating a product that is visually appealing and includes elements that work together. Good design—and especially good business design—often goes unnoticed (that’s maybe why this is a new field of thought for now). Think of the last time that you went to a good restaurant. Think of the experience that you had. Asked to recall the evening, you will most likely talk about the people you are with and the dishes that you at. But what about the décor, the lighting, the music? Those elements probably went unnoticed. But what if those elements weren’t in sync? Or even worse, the didn’t exist. The lighting was hospital lights, the music was rap, and the décor consisted of unfinished walls. Then you would notice, right? Business publications are similar: good business design goes unnoticed and does not detract from the message on the page. In fact, it should support or enhance the message. Business people have little time and they need to know the information fast. Good design should support that. Furthermore, the design elements should match across all materials to show that it comes from the same “family.”

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Barely noticed errors You can see before and after documents of material that we have worked on. The documents show that most managers can make some design choices right. If they were designing a restaurant, they put together décor and music, or lighting and music, but rarely did we see employees creating a cohesive document that had smart design choices across the board. Although readers may not be able to pinpoint the error, most are affected by something called cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is an uncomfortable feeling caused when we interpret two (or more) things that are not in sync. The best way to illustrate cognitive dissonance is to give an example. Look at the two squares to the right. A great example of cognitive dissonance is the Old Marco Lodge menu found in the Before and After Product Example Book.

Notice how they are not parallel. This is not an optical illusion, they just don’t match up. It bugs us to look at both of them and see that they aren’t in sync. What we do at ClearForm (in a very watered down way) is align the two squares so that they match up and create consistency for our clients—in business this is called brand identity. Employees frankly don’t have time to make sure that the two squares are perfectly matched up, but when we make templates that are being used thousands of times, we do have the time to make it look nice for our clients.

Good Business Design There is good business design out there, just not very many firms that have figured it out. Ernst and Young, for example, has designed effective business documents found below.

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ClearForm Style and Brand Guide, March 13, 2011

These are examples of design that is applied well to business. Without getting too much into the specific design choices, I will point out some good business design. Notice the sharp lines used and the overall clean layout (especially the website). This makes the design look very professional. The different yellow blocks on the website pull in the overall design together, but more importantly, guide your eye to important information such as “Contact Us.” The Table of Contents utilizes horizontal lines and grey spacing to segment the different sections of the report. This makes it easier for business professionals to quickly find the information they are looking for and make decisions based on what they have seen. Good business design can make your message clearer, make your brand consistent, and improve the decision-making of your firm.

Business Templates *Examples can be found in the Appendix While good business design helps create strong brand identity and visually appealing documents, good business template design ensures that content on the page adheres to business standards and assists business professional in finding the information they need to make informed decisions. Furthermore, our design is properly incorporated into the Microsoft Office Suite, a practice that design companies rarely do and if they do, they perform it poorly. Business standards that assist business professionals

To:

Business standards in regards to publications are formatting choices that welleducated business professionals expect to see in documents. One of the simplest examples of business standards is the memo header format that can be seen to the right. Every business person expects to see “To:” first and “Subject:” last. Yet, people don’t always adhere to these standards.

From: Date: Subject:

Two consequences result when employees don’t adhere to the standards. First, your company looks uneducated and decreases the image. Second, the information is not being efficiently communicated. This brings us to our next point. We assist business professionals when adhering to business standards because they know where to find information within the document. Working with Office Our documents not only are cosmetically pleasing (brand identity design) and adhere to business standards (business document design) but they also work within the Microsoft Office environment. Because our templates work within Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Publisher, etc., any employee can open up our files and begin creating content. *We assume that they have access to basic Office programs. If you have worked in a professional environment, you may be thinking that “of course ClearForm’s documents should work well in Word,” yet graphic designers rarely integrate their design into Word. We noticed that graphic designers make two fundamental errors that decrease user ability and overall organizational use: designing out of Word and poorly formatting in word. Designing outside Word environment: Most graphic designers work with an array of graphics software to create (STUFF), but they sometimes don’t finalize it where the user will need to produce documents. That is, they may keep the file in a program such as InDesign (a publications software by Adobe) when they ship the final product off. Most managers don’t have a computer with InDesign on it, so usability greatly drops. While ClearForm utilizes the design power of these tools (especially Adobe products), we make sure that the design elements are incorporated into Microsoft Office documents so that all of our users can access and utilize the files.

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Poorly formatting in Word: If the graphic designer happens make the design in word, they most likely do not have the tools to effectively format the document—both for business standards and for lower-level formatting in word such as styles and paragraph options. **The Before and After Product Example Book is a great place to see how design and business templates come together to create publications that enhance the client’s brand image and communication efficiency.

Web Application The web application is the enabling agent for the design and business template aspect of our product. That is, it allows us to distribute our documents so that they are actually used within the organization. We found that one of the greatest problems with document design within an organization is that different people had access to different documents—there was no central distribution point for company documents. Our primary product is Document Center which will offer a new tool for documents to be distributed. DC can be implemented onto our clients current web host. That is, we will put it in the same place that they are currently hosting their website, but under a subdomain that points to our application. For example, if we are working with Gorge Inn and their website is gorgeinn.com, we will create a subdomain at docs.gorgeinn.com. Documents will be distributed through the Document Center based on the user that logs into the system. Each template will have certain tags that are attached to it that will allow access to the document. For example, a Food and Beverage report will have an F&B Department tag (more is explained under Information Architecture). Screen shots These are low-fidelity wireframe mockups of our web application. That is, these are rough sketches of what we would like our final product to look like—or what the user interface will entail. Web designers work with mockups as one of the last stages of the design process before going in and building the application. We plan to begin the web development process mid-April.

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ClearForm Style and Brand Guide, March 13, 2011

Information Architecture The following is the general information architecture of the web application. Document Center has three components, the front end application, the front end profile and the back end administrative side. All components are illustrated below. Front End Application

Index.html (Login)

Dashboard (feed)

Info that is collected from the other sources

Profile

Tutorials/Supplements

Brand Style Guide Documents Document support

Documents

Spreadsheats View Image

Department and Job Title Links to documents previewed

Understanding Styles Memos

Presentations Word Docs

Reprts

Forms

Back End Administrator

Employee is the Assistant F&B Manager

Example of document tagging Food and Beverage

Food and Beverage

Userâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Job Title

Documents

Tags

Hotel Staff

Rationale: Accountants donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t need access to the F&B order request forms. (And we may not want to give them access.

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Building the Application We plan to build Document Center using the following tools: Google Web Toolkit Plugin in Eclipse AMP package: the principal components of the package are Apache, MySQL and PHP: o

Apache is a web server.

MySQL is an open-source database.

PHP (server-side language) is a scripting language that can manipulate information held in a database and generate web pages dynamically each time content is requested by a browser.

JavaScript displays the information of the web application. We have also considered using the Ruby language. HTML as a general coding for display while utilizing CSS which controls the look and feel of the HTML.

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Operations The following is a rough plan of what we want to put together.

Internal Work Flow Basecamp This is our project management application. In this example, you can see that we are working on the project â&#x20AC;&#x153;Working Towards HEC.â&#x20AC;? This application allows us to do the following: Keep track of Milestones (important project due dates) Upload Files: It has version control so we can revert back to old versions of the documents. To-dos: We can assign different members tasks with associated due dates Interact with clients: Basecamp allows us to invite companies to a project. This

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Balsamiq Balsamiq is a low-fidelity wireframe application that helps web application designers prototype the user interface. We use it as a tool to show potential clients what their final product will look like.

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Google Business Apps Google Business Applications allows ClearForm to have custom emails, Google Docs, calendars, groups, intranets, and much more. It is completely customizable. Many small businesses choose Google Apps to manage most of their online data. Below are screenshots of the application.

Custom login for ClearForm

Company calendar: share with co-workers, entire company

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Client Workflow 3/3 - 3/6 Review business needs. First meeting

Client Managers

2/28 - 3/3 Sales Lead

4/11 - 4/14 Implement IT

3/7 - 3/11 Define Business and Document Needs

4/6 - 4/10 Define IT Needs

3/22 Client Design Preview 3/13 - 3/20 Design Work

3/7

3/14

4/14 - 4/18 Onsite Training and Meetings

3/28 - 4/5 Revision Design 3/21

3/28

4/4

4/11

4/18

2/28

4/25 4/26

Information Systems Copy Center

Designers

3/13 - 3/20 Design Work

3/28 - 4/5 Revision Design

3/14 3/15 3/16 3/17 3/18 3/19 3/13

3/29 3/30 3/31 4/1 4/2 4/3 4/4 3/20

3/28

*Design Work Note For companies with established brand image, there are 2 design phases (document design, and revision design) For companies without pre-established brand image, we have 3 phases. (graphic design, document design, and revision design). Consequently we extend our business process by on average 10 days

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4/23 End of Installment

ClearForm Style and Brand Guide, March 13, 2011

4/5

Administrative Plan The following outlines our administrative plan, namely, our legal structure, management, personnel requirements and accounting and legal.

Legal Structure ClearForm is registered as a Limited Liability Corporation. We chose this structure because it gave us power as a small corporation yet flexibility for operations. The following is a list of our managers: Founder, CEO: John Scrugham Co-Founder, CEO: Maxine Hepfer Advisor: Mark McCarthy

Management The management is composed of the two founders, John and Maxi. Co-Founder, CEO: John Scrugham Responsible for creating the company identity, driving growth, and defining strategy. Co-Founder, CEO: Maxine Hepfer Responsible for accounting, legal, and daily operations.

Personnel Currently, John and Maxi are the only personnel. Because we can easily manipulate our well-designed business templates, we do not foresee a great time hindrance to deliver the product. Hiring If we see that our time is more valuable working on upper-level company needs, we will be able to draw on the students of the Hotel School that have graduated from HADM 1175 in good standing. The costs to us for these qualified candidates is very low, as almost no training needs to be provided and wages can be set relatively low. By the end of Spring 2011 semester, we will have hired a web application developer for designing our web app (Document Center). Training The majority of our training is completed through Business Computing, though other essentials will need to be incorporated. We plan to write a book called Corporate Graphic Design: Smart Design Choices for Business Professionals. Design is taught to art students and templates are taught to the business people. Our employees (and ourselves) need to think like both. The book will include a compilation of all the design rules that we make for ourselves. For example, we donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t use WordArt. Development

Accounting & Legal *See our operating agreement for all things legal.

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We will account for our actions using QuickBooks and/or excel. All expenses will be paid out-of-pocket until we see that a bank account is necessary.

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Marketing Plan How ClearForm differs from the others and how we plan to get our name out there

The Marketing Plan We plan to make a comprehensive plan to market our services. We are a business-to-business (B2B) marketer that needs to convince other business that our product will help them service their internal and external customers.

Market Analysis Target market and other things

Target Market Our current operations ability—i.e., our limitations as students—make it difficult to define a target market. While start-ups can best benefit from our product for brand identity, they often don’t have the financial capital or don’t see the value of a strong brand. Larger corporations would benefit most from the productivity enhancing capabilities of effective templates, yet would be hesitant about investing a large dollar sum into a young company. Our short-term target market is the entrepreneurs and startups who understand the necessity for our services. Prime candidates are Hotel School entrepreneurs who have taken business computing. We plan to track down those people. For the hospitality wing of target, these include boutique hotels and regional hospitality firms. During the school year, we will look at Ithaca hotels to use our product. During summer months we will try to integrate our product into the firm that we are working with.

Competition We have both direct and indirect competitors: Direct: Our direct competitors are in-house agencies that create branding and documents for the organization. Indirect: Indirect competitors include brand identity companies such as Inkd. These companies create good-looking documents with consistent look and feel. We believe that we can effectively compete against these brand identity firms because they offer purely publication documents (business cards, promotional brochures, letterheads). We did not find a brand identity firm that could effectively integrate their design into Microsoft Office documents.

Marketing Strategy Pricing As a student-run start-up, we will use the “freemium” strategy. We will offer four templates that are branded to potential clients for free. This will allow them to explore the MS Office environment that we build the templates in and understand the product. If they are satisfied, they can “upgrade” to a full product. We will then work with them to create templates specific to their operations. To price our product, we will do a before and after productivity analysis of our client. Once they get our full product, we will measure new productivity after one month and take 10% of the increased productivity.

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Branding See Brand and Style Guide attached in Appendix I.

Customer Service Dialogue and quality insurance coming soon.

Marketing Objectives The following objectives are designed to drive the marketing mix. Our marketing strategies will be consistent with the stated objectives, which will directly influence the success of ClearForm.

Customer Satisfaction Using the freemium strategy of pricing, we hope to eliminate the barrier of money to create initially satisfied guest.

Customer Awareness We will be working with one of the Members of our LLC, Mark McCarthy, to contact professionals in the Hospitality industry and market our services. We will be presenting our company at the Hotel Ezra Cornell weekend in order to continue to develop company contacts and network with industry professionals.

Positioning Strategy Our positioning strategy depends on which segment of our target market we are looking at.

For start-ups Brand identity across daily used documents. Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have to get locked in to InDesign or illustrator or have no access to the files. Allows for easy customization as the brand grows and changes.

For larger corporations Increased productivity and ROI. With effective templates saving employees time, we can calculate massive productivity increases within the corporation (maybe our client doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t need a secretary anymore).

Product Strategy Core Creating professional, branded documents in less time.

Actual Well-designed documents.

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Augmented Feeling good about the documents that they make.

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Finances How ClearForm differs from the others and how we plan to get our name out there

Financial Documents To be determinedâ&#x20AC;Ś

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Examples In this section you will see all the example of our work.

Style Guide

II.

The Pines

ClearForm Company and Product Overview, March 13, 2011

Appendix

Appendix I

Style and Brand Guide John Scrugham Maxine Hepfer Version 1.0 April 7, 2011

NOTICE: This is an example of our Style and Brand Guide. We have chosen to exclude the table of contents and ClearForm Description because we have already included them earlier in the document. In addition, we have left out header and footer formatting for the purpose of a the appendix.

Appendix I

Overview We created this corporate style guide to both serve as a style guide for ClearForm and also to show off our abilities to create strong brand image for our clients. A style guide often takes on different forms. While the premise of the style guide across organizations is agreed upon—a set of standards for the writing and design of documents—the execution and the overall organizational adherence to a guide varies drastically. Additionally, you may see different firms refer to the style guide using different words. For example, style guide is also referred to as identity guidelines, brand identity guide, house rules, brand guide/ manual, corporate identity manual, corporate design guidelines. The reason that firms create—or should create—a style guide is highlighted in the following: 1. To avoid deviations from the true design which affects the character of your brand. 2. To enhance marketing and sales efforts so that effective use of the brand logo, design and expression generate a positive impact. 3. To communicate professionalism across all materials. The companies with the strongest brand image implement a style guide to provide uniformity in style and formatting of a document. Used long enough and supported by the organization, the different components of the style guide become the "house style." When one refers to a company’s image, they are often referring to their house style. ClearForm uses design elements to put in place a system that ensures a constant and effective house style. The components of a style guide are the brand description, signature, typography, color palate, webbased style, and imagery: Brand Description: Who we are and what we offer. Signature: The dos and don’ts with the ClearForm logo Typography: The font choices as well as the way words appear on the page Color Palate: The corporate color scheme Imagery: What types of images and graphics represent the brand Writing Style: How the copyright should sound, and what is being communicated

Appendix I

Signature The ClearForm signature represents our entire company — from product packaging and advertisements to presentations and memos. Be mindful when using the logo because it is like a personal signature. That is, ClearForm signs off on its documents with its logo. The types of publications that the ClearForm signature is in—and how it is displayed—reflects on the entire company. The signature of our company is what separates the brand from the other brands. To ensure brand identity, the signature of the company must be in good form; it must remain constant across all mediums—print, web, banners, etc. ClearForm’s logotype is used to identify an official publication, presentation, or website of the company. If the use falls outside official use, you will need to gain permission from the appropriate people before publication.

Proper Signature In this section, you will find the proper outlines for the logo. If you want to reproduce the logo, you will need to access the digital master found within Documents Center. The logo should be displayed in its original ratio (1:3.6) with all three aspects intact: Word mark: The word mark is the company’s name: ClearForm Symbol: This is the main graphic of the logo. We have used the twisted band as our symbol. The band represents electronics and the flow of organizational information. At ClearForm, we hope to twist or change the normal operations for improvement. Brandline: This is an optional section of the logo. While company’s may have a tagline for their firm, or a little saying that helps keep the company fresh, we have chosen a Brandline—a description of our company’s value and drive. We do not plan to change Productive Hospitality. The logo will only appear with two different background colors: white and black. Please try to avoid any other background colors as they will interfere with the brands integrity.

Sometimes it may be appropriate to use a black background for the logo. In this case, we change the black text and twisted band to white to maintain sharp contrast with the background color.

Appendix I Positioning The location of the logo is another important aspect of maintaining brand consistency. Location is both where the logo is located and what is located around the logo. Location On the page, the logo should be located in the top left corner, preferably in the header of the document. You should keep white space, approximately the width of the “C” in ClearForm, around all edges of the logo (especially above the logo to the page’s edge and below the logo where your content will be located). The guidelines are outlined below; these are minimum requirements for a typical printed page (8.5” X 11”).

Surrounding area In order to maximize the logo’s visual presence, we ask that you maintain a surrounding area clear of any other graphic elements or text. We have defined the minimum area around the logo as .5X, where X is the X-height of the logo. Always allow at least this amount of clear space around the logo. It is important that this rule is observed and the exclusion zone is maintained at all times. The recommended minimum clearance is to protect the logo; the logo will appear on many different applications and formats, and this will help to give it clarity and presence.

Usage The logo should only be used in company communication such as memos, reports, presentations, guest handbook, menus, website, etc. If the logo is to be used by an affiliated company such as a promotional company or a third party, ClearForm must grant special permission for the usage.

Appendix I Improper Signatures The following are examples of how not to use the corporate signature. Misuse of the signature can result in lost brand equity, confusion, and overall an unprofessional image of the company.

Disproportioned A common mistake to make is mess up the scale of the image when moving it around or trying to resize the logo.

Image is horizontally stretched Image is horizontally pushed *An easy way to fix this mistake is to hold the shift key and then rescale.

Missing Graphics The ClearForm logo should be displayed with all aspects of the logo. It should never be displayed with â&#x20AC;&#x153;island graphics,â&#x20AC;? or graphics that are just part of the full logo

Appendix I

Typography Typography is very important to the company’s image. Typography includes the typeface (font family, style), space in between fonts (kerning, leading, and tracking), and the overall usage of the fonts; different fonts should be used for different functions. Often we start with the larger, more prominent fonts for the top-level headers and smaller fonts for the main content of the publication. In addition, different typefaces speak differently when read.

Typeface The typeface that we chose for the headers follows:

Arial Unicode MS

Arial Unicode MS will be our top-level headers (for this report, they are represented from ClearForm1Header to 3Header. Arial is a simple sans-serif typeface that is both “clear” and has solid “form.” We chose this typeface after picking our main body font—we wanted them to be in the same font family so that their feel would be in harmony throughout the document

The typeface that we chose for main body follows:

Arial Aa Ee Rr Aa Ee Rr

Arial is a widely used sans-serif typeface that is packaged with both Microsoft and Mac OS and is directly displayed through all internet browsers. Because it is both widely distributed and easy to read on electronic screens, Arial has become a standard for online typeface. Use for all on-screen publication as well as shorter memos and reports such as this document.

Times New Roman

Times New Roman is a serif font that is often used for larges bodies of text—such as the end-of-year reports. Use for text-intensive documents.

Eras Demi ITC

Eras Demi ITC is our wordmark (logo) text. In addition, it will be used in all Adobe products as the top-level headers.

Logo font:

With all of the fonts together, we can create a font hierarchy for a certain style so that users can make decisions when to use fonts and when to not. This font hierarchy is displayed clearly in Microsoft Word under the styles tab from the Home page.

Appendix I

Readability With the effective use of typography, we hope to make our documents more readable so that employees can deduce the correct information from our documents in the least amount of time.

Headers Headers increase readability by telling the reader up front about what they can expect to read in the following texts. Headers set up the expectation, so they must be clear about what is to come. For example, notice the title of this section: “headers.” The title sets up the expectation that you will be reading about headers.

Alignment Alignment makes it easy for the reader to follow the text. For the purposes of this style guide—as well as most business documents—we have chosen to left align our text with 1in margins. See left paragraph for an example of business writing.

Lut perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam, eaque ipsa quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt explicabo. Nemo enim ipsam voluptatem quia voluptas sit aspernatur aut odit aut fugit, sed quia consequuntur magni dolores eos qui ratione

Justifying Text For all documents (except those that appear in a periodical or newspaper, use unjustified text (on the left).

Appendix I

Color Palate Color plays an important role in communicating the brand. Over time, customers can recognition a brand solely upon color. While we rely on the primary colors to drive our brand, we have developed secondary colors to aid in brand messaging All the colors are matched using Pantone Matching System in which each color is uncoated (U). This means that the majority of our printing will be printed on uncoated paper. When choosing color it is important to consider the best options from the palette that will project the information clearly, effectively and complement any chosen images. There must always be good contrast between text and the background color. For this reason, each core color has a corresponding lighter and darker color. The lighter palette works well as a background, highlight or graphic. The darker palette is the most suitable for type. They can be used as individual color setsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;i.e., just the blue palette.

Primary Our primary colors are black and yellow. We chose these colors because they are bold and strong colors. The yellow represents the light that we bring to our communicationsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the clearness that we hope to portray in our design. The black offsets the yellow as a solid, professional foundation to the color scheme. We included variations of each color for the use of complementing them in design. The top-level primary colors are meant to be used as primary graphics (logo, font, etc), whereas the lighter colors towards to bottom are best used for backgrounds.

Appendix I Secondary The secondary colors are used to complement the primary colors or to highlight specific areas of graphics/text: Complement: You would use these colors to complement the primary colors in the following example. Highlight: You would use secondary colors to highlight certain text such as hyperlinks on websites, names in the text, or point out an area on a chart. Like the primary colors, we have included lighter variations of the top-level colors to enable design of backgrounds or other areas that need subtler colors.

Appendix I

Imagery The images that are associated with a firm define its style and cultureâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the way you feel when you hear or read about the company. While the design choices that were previously highlighted help define the companyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sense, it is the images that are associated with the company that ultimately define the company. Photography is a powerful and dynamic tool; our values and ethos are reflected in the images we use. They should communicate the diversity, energy and personality of what we do. For example, consider Coca-Cola. The logo is a big part of the company but the images surrounding it make it real. Those images such as smiling kids, the polar bear, and Santa Claus bring a sense and style to the companyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;something that cursive words cannot convey. Images should feel observational and spontaneous rather than staged, and show strong contrast between the different elements of the image.

People Images Images of people should be high quality and show smart thinking and productivity. For example, the man in the most right photo is on his phone and working on his computer. The people should be clean-cut, energetic, and professional. Professional does not mean that they are wearing a suit and tie, but it does mean that they hold themselves in a professional manner.

Appendix I Vector Images Vector images are useful for displaying images that cannot be replicated easily in the real world. ClearForm only uses graphics that are sharp and have high contrast. The first class of vector images includes the black and yellow images. If black and yellow is not an option, you may use images with blue and black in them (mostly useful for graphics that pertain to the internet).

Nature Nature photos must be high contrast and with a variety of textures. For example, the forest photo includes a beam of light, a dark surrounding, and textual diversity with the leaves in the trees. We choose these kinds of photos because they are clear and easy to understand, tying into our values.

General All other photos fall into this category. Our examples currently only include paper products, put they could extend to others. We are looking for dramtic photos. For example, notice the angle that they papers are folding over in the right photo

All images were obtained from istockphoto.com

Appendix I

Writing Style The following section outlines what writing style that we like to use in our communication. An organization must keep consistent writing style across communication to maintain a constant brand image. With a oneperson firm, that may be easy, but as a firm grows, more people enter into the writing process and style can change based on the writer. This section creates a guideline for different writers so that the voice of ClearForm comes through clearly. This is a short excerpt on what ClearForm considers its voice; for more information regarding style—particularly effective business writing style—see our Business Writing Style Guide. For now, we will outline tone of voice and word selection.

Tone of Voice Use an active tone of voice that is strong and clear. What we mean by active voice is that when you write your sentences, make sure that the actor precedes the action. For example, in the sentence “John wrote the paper,” the actor is “John” and “wrote” is the action. To write strong and clear documents, make sure that every word and sentence contributes value. That is, if you see words that don’t help the reader understand the point that you are trying to make, feel free to cut them out. Business writing in particular should be free of “flowery words”—words that sound nice yet don’t add value to the writing.

Word Selection We chose words from our vocabulary to write. The ClearForm vocabulary is based on effective and efficient phrasing and comes from an effective and efficient voice. If ClearForm was a person, he would use the following words and phrases. Become familiar and try to incorporate these words into your vocabulary: Clear Effective Business Design Business Professional’s Smart Thinking Productive hospitality Brand Image/ Brand Identity That is,: use when elaborating on a concept that might not come clearly to the reader

Appendix I

Examples Use the following documents as templates for design choices that you make. While we provide most of the document templates that you may need, we understand that you may want to create custom documents outside of our help.

Stationary These are examples of a letter, memo, and business card.

Appendix I Reports The page on the left is the front cover of the report and the page on the right is a sectional divide.

Appendix I Finances Below you will see an example of a Pro Forma Income Statement

Appendix I Presentations Below you will find a PowerPoint presentation example.

Appendix II

Key Control Log Date

Key Set

Name

Time Out

Time In

Manager

Appendix II

Fax Log Date/Time Received

Recipient

Sender/Subject

# Pages

Initials

Action

Appendix II