#plus everyone consistently mispronounced it

[cerealandchoccymilk]

oh shit. completely forgot about namehunting....

[gaybaconprincess]

I found an old Doc with a Marching Band AU so take it

Jericho / Joseph Wilson (Flute)

‘That one gay friend who has a better fashion sense than me’

Don’t pronounce his last name as ‘willis’ like the principal or he will f you up

And by that he means he’ll get his scary brass boyfriend to f you up

Probably the sassiest person in Band

He is an angry human espresso and if you look at Kyd Wykkyd for too long he’ll break your leg

Very protective of his batnerd

Kole is also a flute n they are very good buds

Vows to one day burn the school’s band uniforms so they have to buy new ones

Calls everyone ‘fam’

If it’s possible to be that one controversial archetype he will be it

He is also the school’s biggest male feminist

Bumblebee is the biggest female feminist

Also he likes penciling in weed symbols (despite the fact he has never touched a drug in his life) all over the school campus

Mainly only joined Band because the Wilson bunch were sitting at a family dinner once and somebody (he doesn’t even remember anymore like maybe ROse?? Maybe Father????) said that the only instrument he could play was his twangy guitar and ofc he took that as a cHALLENGE

Raven / Raven Roth (Clarinet)

Very dark humour

Only real friend is Jericho bc they like to complain about Grayson together

Also Jericho is the only person who laughs at her jokes

Has more power over people than she lets on

Dating the head cheerleader helps too (angel)

Pretty chill

Not v good at physical fighting but just her all around dry personality will intimidate you

The woodwind section is filled with very violent human gnomes it seems

she has a tumblr indeed but trust me yOU DONT WANT IT

its filled with actual witch spells and v v gory things 

Joined Band for the extra credit, stayed for the time away from home

Her home consists of her usually absent mother and emotionally abusive father (my way of inserting Trigon in here somewhere) and Joey is really the only person that knows and she can just vent to

They’ve had well over a few crying sessions

 SeeMore / Seymour Johnson (Saxophone)

Joined band bc he’s a broke idiot in need of a scholarship

Joined saxophone because mEMES

Plays ‘we are number one’ every f-ing time Kyd so much as looks at him

bf(f)’s with the Herald

Totally thirsty for some brass trumpet boy but totally not the Herald oh no

(it’s so the Herald)

Has hit himself in the face with his sax thirteen too many times

Wears the nerdiest glasses possible but no one can say shit bc he’s the best marcher they’ve got really

Chillest of the chill you will ever meet

Cries @ disney movies

Probably watches conspiracy theory videos in his free time

Is slowly attempting to bring tumblr humor into the real world

also afraid of chickens. look its a really long story k.

Joined Band to prove to his parents that nO HE IS NOT DOING DRUGS AFTER SCHOOL HE IS ACTUALLY ATTEMPTiNG to MAKE YOU PROUD

 The Herald / Malcolm Duncan (Trumpet)

Best friends w/ Jericho even tho Jericho regrets it

*Jericho walks into the Band Hall*

‘aND HIS NAME IS JOHN CENA’ *trumpet noises*

He and Seymour meme together

Is just obnoxious in general

Pulls candy and other food items out of nowhere at the worst times

Just wants people to hang out with after school. Hot Spot’s no fun and Jericho’s family is insane.

 BumbleBee / Karen Beecher (French Horn)

Is just way too tired for this

Mom friend

Doesn’t have time to deal with everyone’s shit

Joey can relate

‘malcolm duncan i dare you to blow that trumpet in my ear oNE MORE TIME’

Is everyone’s big sister but mainly Mal’s

Makeup game is always on point

Wants to kick Seymour and Mal in the throat everyday bc jUST KISS YOUR SEXUAL TENSION IS RUINING THE REHEARSAL

 Kyd Wykkyd / Elliot Knight (Trombone)

Toll pencil is dating smol espresso

Looks mean and scary but just wants hugs and colored pencils

‘Deal hugs not drugs’

Makes too many puns

Literally every other sentence has some hidden pun in it

Loves picking Joey up and carrying him around

Gives people really terrible nicknames

Biggest weab of them all

‘I sexually identify as Terezi Pyrope’

Don’t even say the word homestuck/undertale around him he’ll either start crying or laughing maniacally

‘What do you mEAN YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT RWBY IS’

Has memorized all of Light Yagami’s lines on Death Note

Quotes Steven Universe (mainly Pearl) on a daily basis

k like,,,,you think,,,you tHINK he’s the smart friend.

oH NO BUDDY ARE YOU WRONG

if you’ve ever seen any Roosterteeth video ever

He is Gavin Free.

The embodiment of ‘wot if...our legs...didn’t know they were lEGS???’

Joey just kinda shushes him and pretends to know what he’s talking about

Billy Numerous / William Strayer (Euphonium)

Mammoth’s ultimate wingman

‘God bless murica’

Mispronounces words on purpose to piss off Kyd and Raven

Hates his pointy marching shoes

Hides tennis balls in the saxophones to Seymour’s dismay

Got hit with a trombone once and then had to pay for it to be fixed

Totally not kyd’s

Likes to make fun of Joey’s height which is WHY he got hit with a trombone

Roots for BBQ places every time the Band stops to eat on a trip

‘Aight but...does Wykkyd is gay??’

Mammoth / Baran Flinders (Tuba)

Is the most intimidating person you will ever meet and he kNOWS IT he GLOATS IN THAT FACT

‘gEEZ YOU GUYS SHUT UP I DONT HAVE A THING FOR STARFIRE THATS DISGUSTinG’

‘We were just asking why she wasn’t at rehearsal today’

Is also a vry broke idiot but somewhat enjoys band

The aMOUNT of times he has been stopped by football coaches and borderline bribed to be on the team

Is the one who shamelessly sprints the whole way to the cafeteria everyday

‘Foods before dudes, sorry’

He and Billy often have eating competitions

Jericho lives in fear every time he’s not tardy for class

Also looks mean but will cRUSH YOu....with a bear hug

When asked what 2 plus 2 was he responded with a very startled and nervous 22

Kid Flash / Wally West (Percussion)

Look,,,,buddy,,,,amigo,,,,chum,,,,

He and Kyd Wykkyd have had a lil rivalry goin on since the fiRST TIME KYD STOLE HIS APPLE JUICE IN PRE-K

Y do you think he joined percussion… (it’s because percussion is usually seated behind trombones and Kyd hates drums and loud noises)

bUT on the plus side his ADHD is now a lot less terrifying

During practice he literally just plays Hall of Fame on repeat

‘No...no no….no no plEASE STOP TOUCHING MY HAIR’

(jokingly) chants the word ‘gay’ and slowly gets louder every time Kyd so much as sPEAKs

He and Kyd have sarcasm competitions

Also memes but less out loud and more…

‘Wally I sweAR TO GOD IF YOU DONT STOP TeXTING ME MEMES IN CLASS’

‘Wykkyd iS THAT AN WEED IM CALLING THE POLICE’ inside jokes

Jinx / Jaya Salem (Pit)

Just wants a nap

All the time

Someone get her an energy drink

Puts up with Kyd + Mammoth + Billy + See-More’s shit not to mention her little brother most of the time

It’s Gizmo. The little brother is Gizmo.

‘I just...want to just like...can I plug myself into a charger? Can I do that, is that a thing?’

Literally the only person out of her friend circle that passes most of her classes

dO NOT TOUCH HER CATS JUST DONT DO IT

‘Do you think if I concuss myself I can get out of practice for today?’

all of her jokes are also either self depricating or just insulting to others

insomniac

Punk Rocket / Thomas Leonard (Drum Major)

mOST IRRESPONSIBLE DRUM MAJOR EVER 0/10 WOULD NOT RECOMMEND

‘Well y’know...i’m already in a Band so like...how hard could Drum Major be?’

Very hard. He made a mistake. He regrets everything.

School Principal: ‘are you aware that your hair is white?’

Rocket: ‘are you aware that your a fUCKING SQUARE???’

He got suspended after that

‘Okay look I know it looks really gay that I’m riding on a motorcycle with my really hot buddy but it’s not - fuck that is really gay, maybe I’m really gay.’

One big bundle of ‘oh no’ when you pop the question of ‘what’s your sexuality’

Gets wAY TOO INTO the really big moments when directing on field

Fell of the pedestal his first game

Over time actually starts taking Band very seriously and enjoying it

Slade Wilson

funds the Band’s everything

Addie cooks for the Band and helps with fundraisers

also I just really need an AU where Slade is just,,,,a good dad,,,,Joey deserves a good dad k

he was off in the army for a while so he comes back and apparently Joey is not four anymore?? and he has a boyfriend???? and turned out to somehow be shorter than his own mother?????????

Joey made ‘when will my father return from the war’ jokes the entire time to cope

Slade is still getting used to things and the crowd and screaming of football games makes him v uncomfortable but he goes to support Joey

who is off to the side trying to avoid looking at his father who is now waving his hands frantically

Rose comes too but mainly to make fun of the entire Band

Grant’s already in college so he don’t give a shit

Literally everyone in the Band lOVES Mr. Wilson and Adeline but Joey just wants them to leave him alone

Slade is that one dad,,,,he tRIES SO HARD TO UNDERSTAND BAND HUMOR AND IT DOESNT WORK

still doesn’t know how he feels about Kyd 

Slade and Joey bond over Slade picking him up after practice and Joey iMMEDIATELY going into rant mode

‘tHIS HETERO A HOLE DAD YOU WOULDNT BELIEVE-’

surprisingly okay with Joey’s sexuality, he’s still getting used to it nonetheless

Mrs. and Mrs. Wykkyd

Kyd Wykkyd has two v lesbian moms and you can’t tell me otherwise like that’s my headcanon for him plus I love supportive gay parents that are better parents than the hets themselves

Kyd was adopted but they love their beautiful son v v much and he loves them

Kyd never really knew his biological parents and everyone acts like it’s a big deal but he he doesn’t?? care???? he knows who his parents are its Aarti Bindiya-Knight and Alison Knight duh

one of his moms is East Indian so he takes part in a lot of her culture just like his other mom does

he also gets vERY OFFENDED and filled with Righteous Anger when anyone discriminates or makes Indian jokes / lesbian jokes in class

Elliot is taller than both of his moms and usually has to bend down so they can hug him

Alison is American and very vERY kind hearted

Aarti has a very muscley stature and it taller than Alison. Her hair is cut short and curly and she looks like the person who will want to fight you and hug you at the same time.

Alison is v v short and has very light blonde hair that just kind wisps everywhere. V pale and really really likes sundresses.

Alison still tries to kiss Elliot on the cheek before he gets on the bus but Aarti holds her back so Elliot can run

she’s the cooking mom. she cooks. all the time. that’s how she shows her emotions.

‘Aar what if he forgot his backpack or his lunch do you think he’s doing okay what if someone is bullying him as we speak-’ ‘Ali. Ellie is fine. He is twice your height either way there is no way he is getting bullied.’

Alison got Elliot into drawing which he does a lot now

they are v v supportive of literally anything he does and most kids are actually kinda jealous. 

tHEY ARE THE OVEREXCiTeD PARENTS AT EVERY GAME

NEITHER KNOW WHATS GOING ON BUT THEIR SON IS DOING A THING SO THATS WHATS IMPORTANT

they still keep home videos from when Elliot was a baby despite his birthday wish being for them to burn all of the videos last year

Barry Allen

he’s the track coach at their school and everybody was ASTONISHED when he showed up to a football game

‘okay yeah I know where the track field is - can you all maybe chill I just wanna see my nephew hit his drums.’

He and Wally are the ‘Red headed Heathens’ of the school

a term coined by the principal himself

Barry is still trying to get Wally to join track (he is also still failing)

Blows his whistle like a fricking AIRHORN at games

Very big despite only working on his legs ever and also very affectionate so I hope you have a strong spine because he shows his appreciation via hugs

the only teacher with actual freckles

fRECKLES

‘I would give you some cool pep talk Wally but to be honest I have no idea what’s going on just go out and have fun.’

[riichardwilson]

How to Create a Brand Style Guide

When you’re starting your business, you spend a lot of time considering your brand. You want to find a name that fits just right and design a logo that represents the essence of who you are and what you do.

Once it’s out in the world, though, it’s tougher to protect that beautiful brand you’ve created. You want people to talk about your business, but what happens when they mispronounce your name? Or perhaps they post about your product on their blog, but change up your logo to match the color scheme on their website. Or maybe you sponsor an event, only to arrive on the day and find that your logo has been truncated on the signage the hosts created. These are the kinds of branding no-nos that make every marketer cringe.

So what can you do to ensure that your brand continues to be represented properly as your name spreads far and wide? That’s where a brand style guide comes in.

Brand style guides provide parameters for how anyone reproduces your brand’s name or image elsewhere. Here’s how to create a solid brand style guide that keeps your business looking professional and consistent out there in the big world.

Present How to Use Your Name

Some businesses have pretty straightforward names (Whole Foods, for example, is a tough one to mess up). But other brands have names that are a little less clear-cut. Some brands have created words for their name, while others have stylized ways they’d like their name represented.

When it comes to making sure your name is used correctly, it’s helpful to simply let people know how you’d like it used. Sometimes the easiest way to do this is to start with the story behind the name. What seems like a hard-to-remember brand name might become easier to get a handle on if your audience knows the why behind it.

Even if you don’t have the time or space to give your full story, there’s still an opportunity to educate the public on how to use your name. For example, Greek yogurt brand Fage includes the note “It’s pronounced FA-YEH” on all of their cartons of yogurt. While there’s not enough room on a little tin of yogurt to tell the whole story, they’re at least getting the basics of proper pronunciation out there.

It can also be helpful to address common misuses. This might be pronunciation-related, or it might be the way your name is stylized. For example, it’s Walmart, not WalMart or WalMART. This is a particular struggle for brands who have created their own name or use a combination of words as their name. It’s also relevant if your name incorporates a common phrase that itself is often misused (We’ve had some intrepid searchers over the years looking for Duck Tape marketing agency online).

Simply by taking some time on your website and other online assets to give the backstory to your name and demonstrating consistently how you’d like it to be stylized, you can eliminate much of this confusion.

Explain How Your Logo Should Be Used

There’s a lot that goes into designing a logo. Selecting the right imagery, type face, color palette and more takes a lot of time. It’s also common for brands to create several approved versions of their logos. There’s the full logo that you use at the top of your website and in the banners on your social media profiles, but then you might have a smaller, modified logo that you use as the little round profile picture on your Twitter or Instagram profile.

But just because you have a few approved versions of your logo doesn’t mean that people are now free to get creative with your branding and do whatever they’d like. You need to outline how you’d like your logo to represent your brand. That way, your marketing agency team and anyone else who might use your logo to promote your brand knows what’s allowed and what’s not.

Define the Approved Colors

No matter how many versions of your logo you choose to create, it’s up to you to set the colors you’d like to be used.

Consider a brand like Target. Their bullseye logo is instantly recognizable in their signature red. But if it was yellow or blue, you’d be left scratching your head. They’ve set clear brand guidelines that their logo is to be produced with red logo on white background or white logo on red background, and not any other variation.

Other brands are more flexible with the color palette they use for their logo. The Nike swoosh, for instance, is one that we’ve seen in a variety of colors. They sometimes show it as a black swoosh on white background, sometimes vice versa. And other times it’s another color, like red. A brand like Nike can afford to be a little more flexible with their color palette, because their logo itself is so well-known. It doesn’t matter what color the swoosh is; consumers instantly know it’s Nike.

At Duct Tape marketing agency, we settled on a palette with a variety of shades of blue, plus a complementary pop of orange. The black and white elements of our logo and accompanying design elements are not pure white or black—instead we opted for a grey-white called slate and a dark grey charcoal.

No matter what colors you choose for your brand, it is up to you to set approved colors. Make it clear that it’s only your logo if it appears in one of the colors you’ve outlined in your brand style guide.

Clarify Fonts

Fonts are another area where sometimes others try to get creative with your logo. However, as with your color palette, you selected your font for a reason. It conveys the proper attitude for your brand, and if someone’s going to reproduce your logo, they need to use the font you’ve set forth.

It’s not just about the font itself, it’s also important you dictate the size of the font, particularly as it relates to other design elements on the page or within the logo itself. Guaranteeing consistency in font size, placement, and style will make your logo more easily recognizable by consumers.

This is the font guide we’ve created for Duct Tape marketing agency. As you can see, there are three different fonts that we use in a variety of styles, depending on the occasion. In our style guide, we clearly outline how to use each font, and how the elements should relate to each other on the page.

You Set the Mood

When you’re talking about the individual design elements that go into your logo, what you’re really dictating is the mood of your logo—its look and feel. Much has been written about the psychological influence of using certain colors. While there’s not a lot of scientific evidence about how colors influence our buying behaviors, it’s undeniable that we associate certain colors with particular emotions.

For example, someone starting a children’s toy company likely wouldn’t opt for a grey-scale logo. They’d want to pick “fun” colors. Something in bright orange or yellow would be more appropriate to connote the excitement children will feel when they engage with those products. The font might be something light and whimsical that bounces across the page.

On the flip side, a neon-bright logo would not be the first choice for a law firm. Lawyers want to convey their knowledge, expertise, and gravitas with their logo, so they might opt for something in a darker color palette and with a heavy, imposing serif font.

Establish Your Brand Voice

Once you’ve gotten clear on how you’d like your logo and name to be presented, you can broaden it out to talk more about your brand voice. This brand style guidance is most applicable for people who will be writing representing your brand. Whether that’s someone on your marketing agency or sales team, or an outside writer that you tap to help with your content, giving guidelines for your brand voice can help to maintain consistency across all of your messaging.

This is a great place to establish your brand’s personality traits. Do you want to be approachable and down-to-earth? Is the aim to appear authoritative and commanding? Of course, your brand’s personality will vary based on industry and area of focus.

It also pays to provide concrete examples for how you’d like this personality to be expressed. For example, is it okay for writers to use contractions in their communications, or would you prefer to keep things more formal? Are there specific words you’d like writers to either avoid or embrace? These granular guidelines can help keep everyone on the same page.

If there are words or phrases that are particular to your brand, it’s also a good idea to define how you’d like them referred to. For example, McDonald’s is clear on the name of their signature burger, the Big Mac. You don’t see them calling it the Big Mac on store signage and then referring to it as the Big McDonald’s on social media! Make sure that all of your branded words and phrases, not just your logo and business name, are set in stone and consistent across all marketing agency materials.

Include Supporting Visuals

When it comes to representing your brand, it’s not just about your logo. It’s about the kinds of visuals you use across your brand’s platforms and how they represent you as a business.

Set clear guidelines for those who might be creating images to accompany content for your brand. For example, if your brand relies heavily on cartoon images on your website, perhaps you’d like that same aesthetic mirrored across your social media channels. Maybe the images on your website all have a sepia-tone to them, and bright, hyper-edited photos would feel out of place in other representations of your brand online.

Whatever the case may be, clearly spell out what you expect to see when it comes to other visuals associated with your brand. It’s even nice to provide a gallery of approved images, so that people can either pull from that gallery directly or use it to inform their work as they select their own images.

Pulling together your brand style guide is a necessary part of ensuring that your business’s image remains consistent out there in the world.  You spent a lot of time thinking about how best to represent your identity, mission, and customers, and you want to be sure others adhere to the guidelines you’ve established.

If you’re looking for a helpful tool, Canva makes it easy for brands to create a kit with their established logos, colors, and fonts so that it’s easy to share with designers, writers, partners, and others who might be creating content for your brand.

Free eBook  7 Steps to Scale Your Consulting Practice Without Adding Overhead

“This training from Duct Tape marketing agency has exceeded my expectations and I couldn’t be happier” ~ Brooke Patterson, VanderMedia

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source http://www.scpie.org/how-to-create-a-brand-style-guide/ source https://scpie.tumblr.com/post/614165420087427072

[laurelkrugerr]

How to Create a Brand Style Guide

When you’re starting your business, you spend a lot of time considering your brand. You want to find a name that fits just right and design a logo that represents the essence of who you are and what you do.

Once it’s out in the world, though, it’s tougher to protect that beautiful brand you’ve created. You want people to talk about your business, but what happens when they mispronounce your name? Or perhaps they post about your product on their blog, but change up your logo to match the color scheme on their website. Or maybe you sponsor an event, only to arrive on the day and find that your logo has been truncated on the signage the hosts created. These are the kinds of branding no-nos that make every marketer cringe.

So what can you do to ensure that your brand continues to be represented properly as your name spreads far and wide? That’s where a brand style guide comes in.

Brand style guides provide parameters for how anyone reproduces your brand’s name or image elsewhere. Here’s how to create a solid brand style guide that keeps your business looking professional and consistent out there in the big world.

Present How to Use Your Name

Some businesses have pretty straightforward names (Whole Foods, for example, is a tough one to mess up). But other brands have names that are a little less clear-cut. Some brands have created words for their name, while others have stylized ways they’d like their name represented.

When it comes to making sure your name is used correctly, it’s helpful to simply let people know how you’d like it used. Sometimes the easiest way to do this is to start with the story behind the name. What seems like a hard-to-remember brand name might become easier to get a handle on if your audience knows the why behind it.

Even if you don’t have the time or space to give your full story, there’s still an opportunity to educate the public on how to use your name. For example, Greek yogurt brand Fage includes the note “It’s pronounced FA-YEH” on all of their cartons of yogurt. While there’s not enough room on a little tin of yogurt to tell the whole story, they’re at least getting the basics of proper pronunciation out there.

It can also be helpful to address common misuses. This might be pronunciation-related, or it might be the way your name is stylized. For example, it’s Walmart, not WalMart or WalMART. This is a particular struggle for brands who have created their own name or use a combination of words as their name. It’s also relevant if your name incorporates a common phrase that itself is often misused (We’ve had some intrepid searchers over the years looking for Duck Tape marketing agency online).

Simply by taking some time on your website and other online assets to give the backstory to your name and demonstrating consistently how you’d like it to be stylized, you can eliminate much of this confusion.

Explain How Your Logo Should Be Used

There’s a lot that goes into designing a logo. Selecting the right imagery, type face, color palette and more takes a lot of time. It’s also common for brands to create several approved versions of their logos. There’s the full logo that you use at the top of your website and in the banners on your social media profiles, but then you might have a smaller, modified logo that you use as the little round profile picture on your Twitter or Instagram profile.

But just because you have a few approved versions of your logo doesn’t mean that people are now free to get creative with your branding and do whatever they’d like. You need to outline how you’d like your logo to represent your brand. That way, your marketing agency team and anyone else who might use your logo to promote your brand knows what’s allowed and what’s not.

Define the Approved Colors

No matter how many versions of your logo you choose to create, it’s up to you to set the colors you’d like to be used.

Consider a brand like Target. Their bullseye logo is instantly recognizable in their signature red. But if it was yellow or blue, you’d be left scratching your head. They’ve set clear brand guidelines that their logo is to be produced with red logo on white background or white logo on red background, and not any other variation.

Other brands are more flexible with the color palette they use for their logo. The Nike swoosh, for instance, is one that we’ve seen in a variety of colors. They sometimes show it as a black swoosh on white background, sometimes vice versa. And other times it’s another color, like red. A brand like Nike can afford to be a little more flexible with their color palette, because their logo itself is so well-known. It doesn’t matter what color the swoosh is; consumers instantly know it’s Nike.

At Duct Tape marketing agency, we settled on a palette with a variety of shades of blue, plus a complementary pop of orange. The black and white elements of our logo and accompanying design elements are not pure white or black—instead we opted for a grey-white called slate and a dark grey charcoal.

No matter what colors you choose for your brand, it is up to you to set approved colors. Make it clear that it’s only your logo if it appears in one of the colors you’ve outlined in your brand style guide.

Clarify Fonts

Fonts are another area where sometimes others try to get creative with your logo. However, as with your color palette, you selected your font for a reason. It conveys the proper attitude for your brand, and if someone’s going to reproduce your logo, they need to use the font you’ve set forth.

It’s not just about the font itself, it’s also important you dictate the size of the font, particularly as it relates to other design elements on the page or within the logo itself. Guaranteeing consistency in font size, placement, and style will make your logo more easily recognizable by consumers.

This is the font guide we’ve created for Duct Tape marketing agency. As you can see, there are three different fonts that we use in a variety of styles, depending on the occasion. In our style guide, we clearly outline how to use each font, and how the elements should relate to each other on the page.

You Set the Mood

When you’re talking about the individual design elements that go into your logo, what you’re really dictating is the mood of your logo—its look and feel. Much has been written about the psychological influence of using certain colors. While there’s not a lot of scientific evidence about how colors influence our buying behaviors, it’s undeniable that we associate certain colors with particular emotions.

For example, someone starting a children’s toy company likely wouldn’t opt for a grey-scale logo. They’d want to pick “fun” colors. Something in bright orange or yellow would be more appropriate to connote the excitement children will feel when they engage with those products. The font might be something light and whimsical that bounces across the page.

On the flip side, a neon-bright logo would not be the first choice for a law firm. Lawyers want to convey their knowledge, expertise, and gravitas with their logo, so they might opt for something in a darker color palette and with a heavy, imposing serif font.

Establish Your Brand Voice

Once you’ve gotten clear on how you’d like your logo and name to be presented, you can broaden it out to talk more about your brand voice. This brand style guidance is most applicable for people who will be writing representing your brand. Whether that’s someone on your marketing agency or sales team, or an outside writer that you tap to help with your content, giving guidelines for your brand voice can help to maintain consistency across all of your messaging.

This is a great place to establish your brand’s personality traits. Do you want to be approachable and down-to-earth? Is the aim to appear authoritative and commanding? Of course, your brand’s personality will vary based on industry and area of focus.

It also pays to provide concrete examples for how you’d like this personality to be expressed. For example, is it okay for writers to use contractions in their communications, or would you prefer to keep things more formal? Are there specific words you’d like writers to either avoid or embrace? These granular guidelines can help keep everyone on the same page.

If there are words or phrases that are particular to your brand, it’s also a good idea to define how you’d like them referred to. For example, McDonald’s is clear on the name of their signature burger, the Big Mac. You don’t see them calling it the Big Mac on store signage and then referring to it as the Big McDonald’s on social media! Make sure that all of your branded words and phrases, not just your logo and business name, are set in stone and consistent across all marketing agency materials.

Include Supporting Visuals

When it comes to representing your brand, it’s not just about your logo. It’s about the kinds of visuals you use across your brand’s platforms and how they represent you as a business.

Set clear guidelines for those who might be creating images to accompany content for your brand. For example, if your brand relies heavily on cartoon images on your website, perhaps you’d like that same aesthetic mirrored across your social media channels. Maybe the images on your website all have a sepia-tone to them, and bright, hyper-edited photos would feel out of place in other representations of your brand online.

Whatever the case may be, clearly spell out what you expect to see when it comes to other visuals associated with your brand. It’s even nice to provide a gallery of approved images, so that people can either pull from that gallery directly or use it to inform their work as they select their own images.

Pulling together your brand style guide is a necessary part of ensuring that your business’s image remains consistent out there in the world.  You spent a lot of time thinking about how best to represent your identity, mission, and customers, and you want to be sure others adhere to the guidelines you’ve established.

If you’re looking for a helpful tool, Canva makes it easy for brands to create a kit with their established logos, colors, and fonts so that it’s easy to share with designers, writers, partners, and others who might be creating content for your brand.

Free eBook  7 Steps to Scale Your Consulting Practice Without Adding Overhead

“This training from Duct Tape marketing agency has exceeded my expectations and I couldn’t be happier” ~ Brooke Patterson, VanderMedia

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/how-to-create-a-brand-style-guide/ source https://scpie1.blogspot.com/2020/03/how-to-create-brand-style-guide.html

[scpie]

How to Create a Brand Style Guide

When you’re starting your business, you spend a lot of time considering your brand. You want to find a name that fits just right and design a logo that represents the essence of who you are and what you do.

Once it’s out in the world, though, it’s tougher to protect that beautiful brand you’ve created. You want people to talk about your business, but what happens when they mispronounce your name? Or perhaps they post about your product on their blog, but change up your logo to match the color scheme on their website. Or maybe you sponsor an event, only to arrive on the day and find that your logo has been truncated on the signage the hosts created. These are the kinds of branding no-nos that make every marketer cringe.

So what can you do to ensure that your brand continues to be represented properly as your name spreads far and wide? That’s where a brand style guide comes in.

Brand style guides provide parameters for how anyone reproduces your brand’s name or image elsewhere. Here’s how to create a solid brand style guide that keeps your business looking professional and consistent out there in the big world.

Present How to Use Your Name

Some businesses have pretty straightforward names (Whole Foods, for example, is a tough one to mess up). But other brands have names that are a little less clear-cut. Some brands have created words for their name, while others have stylized ways they’d like their name represented.

When it comes to making sure your name is used correctly, it’s helpful to simply let people know how you’d like it used. Sometimes the easiest way to do this is to start with the story behind the name. What seems like a hard-to-remember brand name might become easier to get a handle on if your audience knows the why behind it.

Even if you don’t have the time or space to give your full story, there’s still an opportunity to educate the public on how to use your name. For example, Greek yogurt brand Fage includes the note “It’s pronounced FA-YEH” on all of their cartons of yogurt. While there’s not enough room on a little tin of yogurt to tell the whole story, they’re at least getting the basics of proper pronunciation out there.

It can also be helpful to address common misuses. This might be pronunciation-related, or it might be the way your name is stylized. For example, it’s Walmart, not WalMart or WalMART. This is a particular struggle for brands who have created their own name or use a combination of words as their name. It’s also relevant if your name incorporates a common phrase that itself is often misused (We’ve had some intrepid searchers over the years looking for Duck Tape marketing agency online).

Simply by taking some time on your website and other online assets to give the backstory to your name and demonstrating consistently how you’d like it to be stylized, you can eliminate much of this confusion.

Explain How Your Logo Should Be Used

There’s a lot that goes into designing a logo. Selecting the right imagery, type face, color palette and more takes a lot of time. It’s also common for brands to create several approved versions of their logos. There’s the full logo that you use at the top of your website and in the banners on your social media profiles, but then you might have a smaller, modified logo that you use as the little round profile picture on your Twitter or Instagram profile.

But just because you have a few approved versions of your logo doesn’t mean that people are now free to get creative with your branding and do whatever they’d like. You need to outline how you’d like your logo to represent your brand. That way, your marketing agency team and anyone else who might use your logo to promote your brand knows what’s allowed and what’s not.

Define the Approved Colors

No matter how many versions of your logo you choose to create, it’s up to you to set the colors you’d like to be used.

Consider a brand like Target. Their bullseye logo is instantly recognizable in their signature red. But if it was yellow or blue, you’d be left scratching your head. They’ve set clear brand guidelines that their logo is to be produced with red logo on white background or white logo on red background, and not any other variation.

Other brands are more flexible with the color palette they use for their logo. The Nike swoosh, for instance, is one that we’ve seen in a variety of colors. They sometimes show it as a black swoosh on white background, sometimes vice versa. And other times it’s another color, like red. A brand like Nike can afford to be a little more flexible with their color palette, because their logo itself is so well-known. It doesn’t matter what color the swoosh is; consumers instantly know it’s Nike.

At Duct Tape marketing agency, we settled on a palette with a variety of shades of blue, plus a complementary pop of orange. The black and white elements of our logo and accompanying design elements are not pure white or black—instead we opted for a grey-white called slate and a dark grey charcoal.

No matter what colors you choose for your brand, it is up to you to set approved colors. Make it clear that it’s only your logo if it appears in one of the colors you’ve outlined in your brand style guide.

Clarify Fonts

Fonts are another area where sometimes others try to get creative with your logo. However, as with your color palette, you selected your font for a reason. It conveys the proper attitude for your brand, and if someone’s going to reproduce your logo, they need to use the font you’ve set forth.

It’s not just about the font itself, it’s also important you dictate the size of the font, particularly as it relates to other design elements on the page or within the logo itself. Guaranteeing consistency in font size, placement, and style will make your logo more easily recognizable by consumers.

This is the font guide we’ve created for Duct Tape marketing agency. As you can see, there are three different fonts that we use in a variety of styles, depending on the occasion. In our style guide, we clearly outline how to use each font, and how the elements should relate to each other on the page.

You Set the Mood

When you’re talking about the individual design elements that go into your logo, what you’re really dictating is the mood of your logo—its look and feel. Much has been written about the psychological influence of using certain colors. While there’s not a lot of scientific evidence about how colors influence our buying behaviors, it’s undeniable that we associate certain colors with particular emotions.

For example, someone starting a children’s toy company likely wouldn’t opt for a grey-scale logo. They’d want to pick “fun” colors. Something in bright orange or yellow would be more appropriate to connote the excitement children will feel when they engage with those products. The font might be something light and whimsical that bounces across the page.

On the flip side, a neon-bright logo would not be the first choice for a law firm. Lawyers want to convey their knowledge, expertise, and gravitas with their logo, so they might opt for something in a darker color palette and with a heavy, imposing serif font.

Establish Your Brand Voice

Once you’ve gotten clear on how you’d like your logo and name to be presented, you can broaden it out to talk more about your brand voice. This brand style guidance is most applicable for people who will be writing representing your brand. Whether that’s someone on your marketing agency or sales team, or an outside writer that you tap to help with your content, giving guidelines for your brand voice can help to maintain consistency across all of your messaging.

This is a great place to establish your brand’s personality traits. Do you want to be approachable and down-to-earth? Is the aim to appear authoritative and commanding? Of course, your brand’s personality will vary based on industry and area of focus.

It also pays to provide concrete examples for how you’d like this personality to be expressed. For example, is it okay for writers to use contractions in their communications, or would you prefer to keep things more formal? Are there specific words you’d like writers to either avoid or embrace? These granular guidelines can help keep everyone on the same page.

If there are words or phrases that are particular to your brand, it’s also a good idea to define how you’d like them referred to. For example, McDonald’s is clear on the name of their signature burger, the Big Mac. You don’t see them calling it the Big Mac on store signage and then referring to it as the Big McDonald’s on social media! Make sure that all of your branded words and phrases, not just your logo and business name, are set in stone and consistent across all marketing agency materials.

Include Supporting Visuals

When it comes to representing your brand, it’s not just about your logo. It’s about the kinds of visuals you use across your brand’s platforms and how they represent you as a business.

Set clear guidelines for those who might be creating images to accompany content for your brand. For example, if your brand relies heavily on cartoon images on your website, perhaps you’d like that same aesthetic mirrored across your social media channels. Maybe the images on your website all have a sepia-tone to them, and bright, hyper-edited photos would feel out of place in other representations of your brand online.

Whatever the case may be, clearly spell out what you expect to see when it comes to other visuals associated with your brand. It’s even nice to provide a gallery of approved images, so that people can either pull from that gallery directly or use it to inform their work as they select their own images.

Pulling together your brand style guide is a necessary part of ensuring that your business’s image remains consistent out there in the world.  You spent a lot of time thinking about how best to represent your identity, mission, and customers, and you want to be sure others adhere to the guidelines you’ve established.

If you’re looking for a helpful tool, Canva makes it easy for brands to create a kit with their established logos, colors, and fonts so that it’s easy to share with designers, writers, partners, and others who might be creating content for your brand.

Free eBook  7 Steps to Scale Your Consulting Practice Without Adding Overhead

“This training from Duct Tape marketing agency has exceeded my expectations and I couldn’t be happier” ~ Brooke Patterson, VanderMedia

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/how-to-create-a-brand-style-guide/

[goodra-king]

How to Create a Brand Style Guide

How to Create a Brand Style Guide written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

When you’re starting your business, you spend a lot of time considering your brand. You want to find a name that fits just right and design a logo that represents the essence of who you are and what you do.

Once it’s out in the world, though, it’s tougher to protect that beautiful brand you’ve created. You want people to talk about your business, but what happens when they mispronounce your name? Or perhaps they post about your product on their blog, but change up your logo to match the color scheme on their website. Or maybe you sponsor an event, only to arrive on the day and find that your logo has been truncated on the signage the hosts created. These are the kinds of branding no-nos that make every marketer cringe.

So what can you do to ensure that your brand continues to be represented properly as your name spreads far and wide? That’s where a brand style guide comes in.

Brand style guides provide parameters for how anyone reproduces your brand’s name or image elsewhere. Here’s how to create a solid brand style guide that keeps your business looking professional and consistent out there in the big world.

Present How to Use Your Name

Some businesses have pretty straightforward names (Whole Foods, for example, is a tough one to mess up). But other brands have names that are a little less clear-cut. Some brands have created words for their name, while others have stylized ways they’d like their name represented.

When it comes to making sure your name is used correctly, it’s helpful to simply let people know how you’d like it used. Sometimes the easiest way to do this is to start with the story behind the name. What seems like a hard-to-remember brand name might become easier to get a handle on if your audience knows the why behind it.

Even if you don’t have the time or space to give your full story, there’s still an opportunity to educate the public on how to use your name. For example, Greek yogurt brand Fage includes the note “It’s pronounced FA-YEH” on all of their cartons of yogurt. While there’s not enough room on a little tin of yogurt to tell the whole story, they’re at least getting the basics of proper pronunciation out there.

It can also be helpful to address common misuses. This might be pronunciation-related, or it might be the way your name is stylized. For example, it’s Walmart, not WalMart or WalMART. This is a particular struggle for brands who have created their own name or use a combination of words as their name. It’s also relevant if your name incorporates a common phrase that itself is often misused (We’ve had some intrepid searchers over the years looking for Duck Tape Marketing online).

Simply by taking some time on your website and other online assets to give the backstory to your name and demonstrating consistently how you’d like it to be stylized, you can eliminate much of this confusion.

Explain How Your Logo Should Be Used

There’s a lot that goes into designing a logo. Selecting the right imagery, type face, color palette and more takes a lot of time. It’s also common for brands to create several approved versions of their logos. There’s the full logo that you use at the top of your website and in the banners on your social media profiles, but then you might have a smaller, modified logo that you use as the little round profile picture on your Twitter or Instagram profile.

But just because you have a few approved versions of your logo doesn’t mean that people are now free to get creative with your branding and do whatever they’d like. You need to outline how you’d like your logo to represent your brand. That way, your marketing team and anyone else who might use your logo to promote your brand knows what’s allowed and what’s not.

Define the Approved Colors

No matter how many versions of your logo you choose to create, it’s up to you to set the colors you’d like to be used.

Consider a brand like Target. Their bullseye logo is instantly recognizable in their signature red. But if it was yellow or blue, you’d be left scratching your head. They’ve set clear brand guidelines that their logo is to be produced with red logo on white background or white logo on red background, and not any other variation.

Other brands are more flexible with the color palette they use for their logo. The Nike swoosh, for instance, is one that we’ve seen in a variety of colors. They sometimes show it as a black swoosh on white background, sometimes vice versa. And other times it’s another color, like red. A brand like Nike can afford to be a little more flexible with their color palette, because their logo itself is so well-known. It doesn’t matter what color the swoosh is; consumers instantly know it’s Nike.

At Duct Tape Marketing, we settled on a palette with a variety of shades of blue, plus a complementary pop of orange. The black and white elements of our logo and accompanying design elements are not pure white or black—instead we opted for a grey-white called slate and a dark grey charcoal.

No matter what colors you choose for your brand, it is up to you to set approved colors. Make it clear that it’s only your logo if it appears in one of the colors you’ve outlined in your brand style guide.

Clarify Fonts

Fonts are another area where sometimes others try to get creative with your logo. However, as with your color palette, you selected your font for a reason. It conveys the proper attitude for your brand, and if someone’s going to reproduce your logo, they need to use the font you’ve set forth.

It’s not just about the font itself, it’s also important you dictate the size of the font, particularly as it relates to other design elements on the page or within the logo itself. Guaranteeing consistency in font size, placement, and style will make your logo more easily recognizable by consumers.

This is the font guide we’ve created for Duct Tape Marketing. As you can see, there are three different fonts that we use in a variety of styles, depending on the occasion. In our style guide, we clearly outline how to use each font, and how the elements should relate to each other on the page.

You Set the Mood

When you’re talking about the individual design elements that go into your logo, what you’re really dictating is the mood of your logo—its look and feel. Much has been written about the psychological influence of using certain colors. While there’s not a lot of scientific evidence about how colors influence our buying behaviors, it’s undeniable that was associate certain colors with particular emotions.

For example, someone starting a children’s toy company likely wouldn’t opt for a grey-scale logo. They’d want to pick “fun” colors. Something in bright orange or yellow would be more appropriate to connote the excitement children will feel when they engage with those products. The font might be something light and whimsical that bounces across the page.

On the flip side, a neon-bright logo would not be the first choice for a law firm. Lawyers want to convey their knowledge, expertise, and gravitas with their logo, so they might opt for something in a darker color palette and with a heavy, imposing serif font.

Establish Your Brand Voice

Once you’ve gotten clear on how you’d like your logo and name to be presented, you can broaden it out to talk more about your brand voice. This brand style guidance is most applicable for people who will be writing representing your brand. Whether that’s someone on your marketing or sales team, or an outside writer that you tap to help with your content, giving guidelines for your brand voice can help to maintain consistency across all of your messaging.

This is a great place to establish your brand’s personality traits. Do you want to be approachable and down-to-earth? Is the aim to appear authoritative and commanding? Of course, your brand’s personality will vary based on industry and area of focus.

It also pays to provide concrete examples for how you’d like this personality to be expressed. For example, is it okay for writers to use contractions in their communications, or would you prefer to keep things more formal? Are there specific words you’d like writers to either avoid or embrace? These granular guidelines can help keep everyone on the same page.

If there are words or phrases that are particular to your brand, it’s also a good idea to define how you’d like them referred to. For example, McDonald’s is clear on the name of their signature burger, the Big Mac. You don’t see them calling it the Big Mac on store signage and then referring to it as the Big McDonald’s on social media! Make sure that all of your branded words and phrases, not just your logo and business name, are set in stone and consistent across all marketing materials.

Include Supporting Visuals

When it comes to representing your brand, it’s not just about your logo. It’s about the kinds of visuals you use across your brand’s platforms and how they represent you as a business.

Set clear guidelines for those who might be creating images to accompany content for your brand. For example, if your brand relies heavily on cartoon images on your website, perhaps you’d like that same aesthetic mirrored across your social media channels. Maybe the images on your website all have a sepia-tone to them, and bright, hyper-edited photos would feel out of place in other representations of your brand online.

Whatever the case may be, clearly spell out what you expect to see when it comes to other visuals associated with your brand. It’s even nice to provide a gallery of approved images, so that people can either pull from that gallery directly or use it to inform their work as they select their own images.

Pulling together your brand style guide is a necessary part of ensuring that your business’s image remains consistent out there in the world.  You spent a lot of time thinking about how best to represent your identity, mission, and customers, and you want to be sure others adhere to the guidelines you’ve established.

If you’re looking for a helpful tool, Canva makes it easy for brands to create a kit with their established logos, colors, and fonts so that it’s easy to share with designers, writers, partners, and others who might be creating content for your brand.

from https://bit.ly/3aBLBTO

[bisoroblog]

Teachers’ Strategies for Pronouncing and Remembering Students’ Names Correctly

Sandeep Acharya answered when his teachers and classmates called him Sand-eep, even Sandy, for 12 years before he decided he couldn’t take it any longer: “Junior year of high school, I walked up to the blackboard in every one of my classes and drew a circle with lines radiating from the center. ‘Sun-deep,’ I said in a loud, firm voice. ‘Sun. Like a sun.’ ”

The memory returned to Acharya, CEO of a health care startup, recently when he noticed his 2-year-old daughter introducing herself differently. “To white people, she’d say Savita, with a hard ‘t’ like in ‘torch.’ To everyone else, she’d say her name, Savita, where the ‘t’ makes a soft ‘th’ sound, like in ‘the.’ ”

Rita Kohli, a professor in the Graduate School of Education at UC Riverside, explains the Hindi phenomenon as it applies to her own name: “It’s like Aretha Franklin but without the ‘uh.’ ”

While mispronouncing a student’s name may seem minor, it can have a significant impact on how they see themselves and their cultural background, causing feelings of anxiety, invisibility, shame, resentment and humiliation, all of which can lead to social and educational disengagement. Kohli documented these findings in a 2012 article she co-authored with UCLA professor Daniel Solórzano titled “Teachers, please learn our names!”

Aspirations and motivation can suffer from the cumulative effect of these “mini-disasters,” which also set the tone for how students treat each other. On the other side of the coin, correct pronunciation can help “develop trust and rapport,” according to Christine Yeh, a professor at the University of San Francisco School of Education.

That’s why California’s Santa Clara County Office of Education created the “My Name, My Identity” campaign. The initiative asks community members to take a pledge to pronounce names correctly in order to foster a sense that students of all backgrounds are valuable and belong.

The names of white and nonwhite children alike are mispronounced, Kohli and Solórzano write, but the experience is much more damaging for a child who “goes to school and reads textbooks that do not reference her culture, sees no teachers or administrators that look like her, and perhaps does not hear her home language,” since these cues (plus advertisements, movies and other indicators of societal values at large) already communicate “that who they are and where they come from is not important.” For one Latina study participant, having her name mispronounced made her wish her parents were more Americanized; a Sri Lankan American reported feeling that his name was “an imposition on others.”

They’re not imagining things. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, a sociolinguist at The Ohio State University, says the effort we put into overcoming a “barrier to communication” depends on (and communicates) social values. “You see the difference if you think about the way Americans typically respond to somebody with a heavy French accent versus somebody with a heavy Mandarin accent,” she explains. When it comes to names, an American who mispronounces the British surname St. Clair (think “Sinclair”), she says, will tend to have a sense of, “Oh, they have a fancy, special language, and if I don’t know how to handle that, it’s a flaw in me.” Whereas a Chinese name might provoke the reaction: “Those names are really hard to understand, and it’s not my responsibility to engage with that.”

The latter also “happens a lot with white teachers responding to names that are seen as typically black,” Campbell-Kibler says. According to Robert Bjork—a psychology professor at UCLA who is a leading scholar on human learning and memory—there are several reasons why names of all cultures can be difficult to remember. For starters, they’re arbitrary labels, as opposed to a nickname like “Red” or “Tiny,” which a person’s physical appearance might trigger. Then there’s the fact that “other demands often occupy our attentional and memory processes when we are meeting somebody new.” Whether that’s at a cocktail party or in a classroom with 33 children, distraction can make it impossible to recall a new name just minutes later. Even when initial storage is successful, Bjork says, retrieval is hampered because we accumulate a huge number of names over our lifetimes, many of which are similar.

On top of these difficulties, there can be linguistic barriers to pronouncing names that aren’t in one’s native tongue, particularly when dealing with differing sound systems. Professor Campbell-Kibler offers up Korean as an example. She says there are two separate sounds that occupy what an English speaker would think of as the “s” space, and a teacher might not have the cognitive capacity to perceive the difference between them.

“If I don’t go and actually learn how to speak Korean extensively for years, I may just always get that wrong,” she says, but this type of real linguistic constraint “doesn’t come up all that often.” In other words, teachers are capable of pronouncing most names correctly.

How then can educators overcome the hurdles to doing so?

It’s tempting to put the first key practice—mustering a legitimate interest in the name—into the bucket labeled “duh” by Samantha Giles, a special education teacher at Hill Elementary School in Garden Grove, California, but it stems from neural complexities. Say you were to ask Professor Bjork how to spell and pronounce his last name. He explains that if he replied “Bee-york” you might ask why it is not pronounced “Bah-Jork,” after which he would tell you that it is a Scandinavian name, similar to the word “fjord” where the “j” is pronounced like a “y.” Or he might add that “Bjork” means “birch,” as in the tree. An exchange like this, he says, “will exercise the very types of processing that enhance memory.” In other words, it overcomes the cocktail party problem. The second essential step, he says, is “to produce—that is, actually say, someone’s name, because retrieving a name makes that name more retrievable in the future than does just hearing it.”

“How would you like me to say your child’s name?” is the specific wording Professor Kohli recommends for parents, and the following for students:

“I don’t know how to say your name yet, can you explain it to me? I’m working on learning it, and it’s important to me to say it the way it’s meant to be said, the way your parents say it.”

Then try the name. Ask if you’re right. Try again, “no matter how long it takes.” Once you’ve got the proper pronunciation, repeat it aloud. Eighth-grade science teacher Carry Hansen, who also coaches cross-country and track as well as coordinating the advisory program for Trinity Valley School in Fort Worth, Texas, recommends using kids’ names as much as possible, almost as obnoxiously as a telemarketer would, until they sink in.

If that whole process sounds awkward, good. Professor Bjork’s research, conducted in partnership with Elizabeth Ligon Bjork, shows that difficulty learning something gives the thing being learned a sense of importance, and errors that trigger elaboration produce better retention. This concept of “desirable difficulties” means the discomfort of admitting you’re having trouble pronouncing someone’s name could actually aid in recall, and Bjork says “that such a clarifying exchange has a positive effect, not a negative effect, on the person whose name you are having trouble pronouncing.”

Thanks to the power dynamic that makes it hard for a student to question a teacher, the onus of initiating this type of conversation falls on educators, in Kohli’s view, and she says they should take a learner’s approach in doing so. Start with a little soul-searching:

Is this name hard to pronounce, or is that just my vantage point? (Susan Balogh, a teacher at Baker School in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, reminds herself, “Unless our names are Lakota, Penobscot or Apache in heritage, they are all ‘foreign.’ ”) Then, be explicit, Kohli says, telling the class “that this is our limitation, not any fault of the student.” Use the “I” statements suggested above and avoid the frustrated looks and embarrassed laughs that tend to accompany pronunciation difficulty. Hansen gives students permission to correct her; in fact, she advises, “tell the kid that they MUST correct you if you are saying their name incorrectly.”

Many teachers report playing “the name game” and Professor Yeh, who teaches school counselors with caseloads of 200-500 students, takes a similar approach, asking each of her graduate students to share the story of their chosen name and its proper pronunciation on the first day of class. Then she, too, gets frank about it, declaring that “we won’t consistently mispronounce a name because we are too afraid to ask, or too afraid to correct ourselves.”

Yeh draws attention to another tactic that can help with pronunciation: learning the basic rules from a variety of languages, “like an ‘x’ in Chinese is pronounced as an ‘sh’ sound, with the tip of your tongue down, below your lower front teeth.” (Just as “a” in Savita makes the “uh” sound thanks to Hindi origin, and the letter “j” in Spanish makes the sound English speakers attribute to the letter “h.” If this seems like too much to wrap one’s head around, remember the classic example of “ghoti” as an alternative English spelling of “fish,” because “gh” makes the “f” sound in “enough,” “o” makes the “i” sound in “women,” and “ti” makes the “sh” sound in “nation.”) Campbell-Kibler, the linguistics professor, confirms: “You can go find that out. Each language is a system, just like English, but the question is, is somebody willing to do that, and what influences how willing they are to do that?”

Even those who know how to say a name like a native speaker may hesitate for fear of cultural appropriation: “It might be socially a little strange to perfectly produce somebody’s name as if I were saying it in the language,” Campbell-Kibler says. That’s why this diverse group of experts all come back to the same bottom-line recommendation: Ask the student and family which pronunciation they prefer.

It won’t always be the one used at home. It is not uncommon for students to choose an Americanized pronunciation or a new name entirely. “At the end of the day, I have to respect the person standing in front of me,” Campbell-Kibler says, “and if they are saying, ‘Call me Joe,’ OK, I’ll call you Joe.”

Just so long as it isn’t for the expediency of school personnel. Professor Yeh says that in the early 2000s, she was told by students at Lower East Side Preparatory High School that they had been assigned an American name or asked to choose one. When kids “basically said, ‘We want our Chinese names back,’ ” Yeh talked to teachers and administrators and was told they “couldn’t possibly learn 300 Chinese names.” And yet, when the students hosted a brown bag lunch where they offered to teach the proper pronunciation of their names, Yeh says, “almost every single teacher and counselor and staff member showed up.”

In the absence of a similar initiative, teachers report using time-honored tricks to remember name pronunciation, like word association (which addresses Bjork’s arbitrary label problem), writing down each syllable in English phonetics, and rhyming (“Alazaeia = Princess Leia” is one Giles uses), as well as new-fangled ones like name pronunciation websites (e.g., www.pronouncenames.com).

What if you witness a mispronunciation by another adult?

Kohli says a classmate of her daughter benefited from a Latina kindergarten teacher who referred to him as his parents did. His first-grade teacher, however, changed both the sounds and inflection. (Professor Yeh reminds, “With many of the names that have tildes or umlauts or little markings, that is actually really important, too.” When making name tents and folders, she says, remember “it’s not just the spoken word; it’s the written name as well.”) While Kohli encourages parents to be direct in advocating for their own child’s name, she sought balance in her dual role as a professor and parent of a classmate, figuring, “I can’t just go in there and slap down my research.”

Instead, whenever the first-grade teacher was in earshot, she made a point to properly pronounce that student’s name. Eventually, it worked.

And that might be the most important lesson Kohli and Solórzano have to offer: “[Since] students will often take the cue of fearing or celebrating difference from the climate set up by teachers, … educators are in a unique position to shape the perceptions of their students” about themselves and others. In the age of growth mindset and “marvelous mistakes,” teachers, counselors, literacy specialists, social workers, administrators, yard staff, PTA members and any other adult who interacts with children at a school can reframe name pronunciation as an opportunity rather than a challenge.

Balogh, the Boston-area teacher, sums it up: “If I can’t make a consistent, good-faith effort to pronounce a name correctly, the implicit message is that I can’t be bothered.” Those who show that they can take an important step toward making all students feel seen and respected, necessary prerequisites for an engaging social and academic experience.

Teachers’ Strategies for Pronouncing and Remembering Students’ Names Correctly published first on https://dlbusinessnow.tumblr.com/

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Teachers’ Strategies for Pronouncing and Remembering Students’ Names Correctly

Sandeep Acharya answered when his teachers and classmates called him Sand-eep, even Sandy, for 12 years before he decided he couldn’t take it any longer: “Junior year of high school, I walked up to the blackboard in every one of my classes and drew a circle with lines radiating from the center. ‘Sun-deep,’ I said in a loud, firm voice. ‘Sun. Like a sun.’ ”

The memory returned to Acharya, CEO of a health care startup, recently when he noticed his 2-year-old daughter introducing herself differently. “To white people, she’d say Savita, with a hard ‘t’ like in ‘torch.’ To everyone else, she’d say her name, Savita, where the ‘t’ makes a soft ‘th’ sound, like in ‘the.’ ”

Rita Kohli, a professor in the Graduate School of Education at UC Riverside, explains the Hindi phenomenon as it applies to her own name: “It’s like Aretha Franklin but without the ‘uh.’ ”

While mispronouncing a student’s name may seem minor, it can have a significant impact on how they see themselves and their cultural background, causing feelings of anxiety, invisibility, shame, resentment and humiliation, all of which can lead to social and educational disengagement. Kohli documented these findings in a 2012 article she co-authored with UCLA professor Daniel Solórzano titled “Teachers, please learn our names!”

Aspirations and motivation can suffer from the cumulative effect of these “mini-disasters,” which also set the tone for how students treat each other. On the other side of the coin, correct pronunciation can help “develop trust and rapport,” according to Christine Yeh, a professor at the University of San Francisco School of Education.

That’s why California’s Santa Clara County Office of Education created the “My Name, My Identity” campaign. The initiative asks community members to take a pledge to pronounce names correctly in order to foster a sense that students of all backgrounds are valuable and belong.

The names of white and nonwhite children alike are mispronounced, Kohli and Solórzano write, but the experience is much more damaging for a child who “goes to school and reads textbooks that do not reference her culture, sees no teachers or administrators that look like her, and perhaps does not hear her home language,” since these cues (plus advertisements, movies and other indicators of societal values at large) already communicate “that who they are and where they come from is not important.” For one Latina study participant, having her name mispronounced made her wish her parents were more Americanized; a Sri Lankan American reported feeling that his name was “an imposition on others.”

They’re not imagining things. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, a sociolinguist at The Ohio State University, says the effort we put into overcoming a “barrier to communication” depends on (and communicates) social values. “You see the difference if you think about the way Americans typically respond to somebody with a heavy French accent versus somebody with a heavy Mandarin accent,” she explains. When it comes to names, an American who mispronounces the British surname St. Clair (think “Sinclair”), she says, will tend to have a sense of, “Oh, they have a fancy, special language, and if I don’t know how to handle that, it’s a flaw in me.” Whereas a Chinese name might provoke the reaction: “Those names are really hard to understand, and it’s not my responsibility to engage with that.”

The latter also “happens a lot with white teachers responding to names that are seen as typically black,” Campbell-Kibler says. According to Robert Bjork—a psychology professor at UCLA who is a leading scholar on human learning and memory—there are several reasons why names of all cultures can be difficult to remember. For starters, they’re arbitrary labels, as opposed to a nickname like “Red” or “Tiny,” which a person’s physical appearance might trigger. Then there’s the fact that “other demands often occupy our attentional and memory processes when we are meeting somebody new.” Whether that’s at a cocktail party or in a classroom with 33 children, distraction can make it impossible to recall a new name just minutes later. Even when initial storage is successful, Bjork says, retrieval is hampered because we accumulate a huge number of names over our lifetimes, many of which are similar.

On top of these difficulties, there can be linguistic barriers to pronouncing names that aren’t in one’s native tongue, particularly when dealing with differing sound systems. Professor Campbell-Kibler offers up Korean as an example. She says there are two separate sounds that occupy what an English speaker would think of as the “s” space, and a teacher might not have the cognitive capacity to perceive the difference between them.

“If I don’t go and actually learn how to speak Korean extensively for years, I may just always get that wrong,” she says, but this type of real linguistic constraint “doesn’t come up all that often.” In other words, teachers are capable of pronouncing most names correctly.

How then can educators overcome the hurdles to doing so?

It’s tempting to put the first key practice—mustering a legitimate interest in the name—into the bucket labeled “duh” by Samantha Giles, a special education teacher at Hill Elementary School in Garden Grove, California, but it stems from neural complexities. Say you were to ask Professor Bjork how to spell and pronounce his last name. He explains that if he replied “Bee-york” you might ask why it is not pronounced “Bah-Jork,” after which he would tell you that it is a Scandinavian name, similar to the word “fjord” where the “j” is pronounced like a “y.” Or he might add that “Bjork” means “birch,” as in the tree. An exchange like this, he says, “will exercise the very types of processing that enhance memory.” In other words, it overcomes the cocktail party problem. The second essential step, he says, is “to produce—that is, actually say, someone’s name, because retrieving a name makes that name more retrievable in the future than does just hearing it.”

“How would you like me to say your child’s name?” is the specific wording Professor Kohli recommends for parents, and the following for students:

“I don’t know how to say your name yet, can you explain it to me? I’m working on learning it, and it’s important to me to say it the way it’s meant to be said, the way your parents say it.”

Then try the name. Ask if you’re right. Try again, “no matter how long it takes.” Once you’ve got the proper pronunciation, repeat it aloud. Eighth-grade science teacher Carry Hansen, who also coaches cross-country and track as well as coordinating the advisory program for Trinity Valley School in Fort Worth, Texas, recommends using kids’ names as much as possible, almost as obnoxiously as a telemarketer would, until they sink in.

If that whole process sounds awkward, good. Professor Bjork’s research, conducted in partnership with Elizabeth Ligon Bjork, shows that difficulty learning something gives the thing being learned a sense of importance, and errors that trigger elaboration produce better retention. This concept of “desirable difficulties” means the discomfort of admitting you’re having trouble pronouncing someone’s name could actually aid in recall, and Bjork says “that such a clarifying exchange has a positive effect, not a negative effect, on the person whose name you are having trouble pronouncing.”

Thanks to the power dynamic that makes it hard for a student to question a teacher, the onus of initiating this type of conversation falls on educators, in Kohli’s view, and she says they should take a learner’s approach in doing so. Start with a little soul-searching:

Is this name hard to pronounce, or is that just my vantage point? (Susan Balogh, a teacher at Baker School in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, reminds herself, “Unless our names are Lakota, Penobscot or Apache in heritage, they are all ‘foreign.’ ”) Then, be explicit, Kohli says, telling the class “that this is our limitation, not any fault of the student.” Use the “I” statements suggested above and avoid the frustrated looks and embarrassed laughs that tend to accompany pronunciation difficulty. Hansen gives students permission to correct her; in fact, she advises, “tell the kid that they MUST correct you if you are saying their name incorrectly.”

Many teachers report playing “the name game” and Professor Yeh, who teaches school counselors with caseloads of 200-500 students, takes a similar approach, asking each of her graduate students to share the story of their chosen name and its proper pronunciation on the first day of class. Then she, too, gets frank about it, declaring that “we won’t consistently mispronounce a name because we are too afraid to ask, or too afraid to correct ourselves.”

Yeh draws attention to another tactic that can help with pronunciation: learning the basic rules from a variety of languages, “like an ‘x’ in Chinese is pronounced as an ‘sh’ sound, with the tip of your tongue down, below your lower front teeth.” (Just as “a” in Savita makes the “uh” sound thanks to Hindi origin, and the letter “j” in Spanish makes the sound English speakers attribute to the letter “h.” If this seems like too much to wrap one’s head around, remember the classic example of “ghoti” as an alternative English spelling of “fish,” because “gh” makes the “f” sound in “enough,” “o” makes the “i” sound in “women,” and “ti” makes the “sh” sound in “nation.”) Campbell-Kibler, the linguistics professor, confirms: “You can go find that out. Each language is a system, just like English, but the question is, is somebody willing to do that, and what influences how willing they are to do that?”

Even those who know how to say a name like a native speaker may hesitate for fear of cultural appropriation: “It might be socially a little strange to perfectly produce somebody’s name as if I were saying it in the language,” Campbell-Kibler says. That’s why this diverse group of experts all come back to the same bottom-line recommendation: Ask the student and family which pronunciation they prefer.

It won’t always be the one used at home. It is not uncommon for students to choose an Americanized pronunciation or a new name entirely. “At the end of the day, I have to respect the person standing in front of me,” Campbell-Kibler says, “and if they are saying, ‘Call me Joe,’ OK, I’ll call you Joe.”

Just so long as it isn’t for the expediency of school personnel. Professor Yeh says that in the early 2000s, she was told by students at Lower East Side Preparatory High School that they had been assigned an American name or asked to choose one. When kids “basically said, ‘We want our Chinese names back,’ ” Yeh talked to teachers and administrators and was told they “couldn’t possibly learn 300 Chinese names.” And yet, when the students hosted a brown bag lunch where they offered to teach the proper pronunciation of their names, Yeh says, “almost every single teacher and counselor and staff member showed up.”

In the absence of a similar initiative, teachers report using time-honored tricks to remember name pronunciation, like word association (which addresses Bjork’s arbitrary label problem), writing down each syllable in English phonetics, and rhyming (“Alazaeia = Princess Leia” is one Giles uses), as well as new-fangled ones like name pronunciation websites (e.g., www.pronouncenames.com).

What if you witness a mispronunciation by another adult?

Kohli says a classmate of her daughter benefited from a Latina kindergarten teacher who referred to him as his parents did. His first-grade teacher, however, changed both the sounds and inflection. (Professor Yeh reminds, “With many of the names that have tildes or umlauts or little markings, that is actually really important, too.” When making name tents and folders, she says, remember “it’s not just the spoken word; it’s the written name as well.”) While Kohli encourages parents to be direct in advocating for their own child’s name, she sought balance in her dual role as a professor and parent of a classmate, figuring, “I can’t just go in there and slap down my research.”

Instead, whenever the first-grade teacher was in earshot, she made a point to properly pronounce that student’s name. Eventually, it worked.

And that might be the most important lesson Kohli and Solórzano have to offer: “[Since] students will often take the cue of fearing or celebrating difference from the climate set up by teachers, … educators are in a unique position to shape the perceptions of their students” about themselves and others. In the age of growth mindset and “marvelous mistakes,” teachers, counselors, literacy specialists, social workers, administrators, yard staff, PTA members and any other adult who interacts with children at a school can reframe name pronunciation as an opportunity rather than a challenge.

Balogh, the Boston-area teacher, sums it up: “If I can’t make a consistent, good-faith effort to pronounce a name correctly, the implicit message is that I can’t be bothered.” Those who show that they can take an important step toward making all students feel seen and respected, necessary prerequisites for an engaging social and academic experience.

Teachers’ Strategies for Pronouncing and Remembering Students’ Names Correctly published first on https://greatpricecourse.tumblr.com/