Animal Planet On Air Styleguide

• gig: web design, coding
• client: Animal Planet/Discovery Communications
• location: Silver Spring, MD
• creative_direction: Linas Virbickas
• design: Krista Brocenos, Jay Perry
• completed: In progress

For the last year, the Animal Planet group has been developing a system for maintaining the brand across all media - broadcast, print, and online - that has resulted in a series of 'styleguides.' Detailed references on use of the logo, taglines, and other identifiers, these publications keep everybody up to speed on the standards and best practices. My colleague Krista built out an excellent, very readable print version of the broadcast guidelines, which have extensive documentation on interstitials, transitions, and show promos.

I stepped in to create an online version, which can be kept current more easily and accessed by vendors worldwide. Here, we also took advantage of the web's flexibility to use different accent colors for each section, and we display example clips right in the page layout. I built a lightweight PHP templating system to handle over 100 pages of content quickly and easily. Our clients love the design so much we're using it as a reference for a lot of new Animal Planet interactive.