On Tuesday I broke ground on an important topic in a new teaching environment. It was my first (and definitely not last) teaching experience at Creative Live.

When researching for my class, Building a Brand Book: When, Why, and How, I realized that there’s no standardization of what elements go into brand standards. Certainly each company is unique, but I saw a great opportunity to establish a hierarchy of recommended content contained in a company’s brand standards, vis-à-vis the scale of the company. To my knowledge, this hasn’t been done.

Preparing for six hours of content was somewhat easy, since I’ve got a lot of case studies from my professional experience about the power of brand transformations, and how it aligns people, rekindles their passion, and is a quantitative measure of success. I talked a lot about the value of consistency and how brand standards help ensure that.

But what was new about this experience – and more of a challenge to prepare for – were the role-play conversations, and guiding the six in-studio students (pictured, top row above) about how to have them. It’s easy to recognize the signs of inconsistency, harder to do take matters into your own hands and do something about it. By the end of the class, they felt empowered, and saw how much they could do.

The most thrilling part was the reach: 2500 people live-streamed the class from all over the world. Some students hung out on CL all day. The impeccable host, Chris Jennings (holding Brand Bible, above), did an amazing job integrating their chat room comments and questions into the course content, and bringing a global perspective from designers and non-designers alike. And he did it all with a smile. Thank you, Chris, Aleza, the production team, and Creative Live!