This major release focuses on 2 main areas:
- It introduces a place to centralise your core brand elements, such as logos, colours, fonts, and typography, under the ‘Brand & Skinning’ admin section - previously called ‘Skins’.
This makes it even easier to apply your branding to more areas of your system and choose brand colours throughout the system. WCAG AA/AAA accessibility checks are also in place to help ensure colour combinations have enough contrast.
Finally, these brand elements can be published to a public webpage via an auto-generated ‘Brand Kit’. - This release also brings several UI improvements to the DAM, Search, and Admin areas, including a fresh look and feel, better mobile views, and the ability for end-users to decide the size of asset thumbnails.
Brand and Skinning
Not only does the skinning tool have a new name, but it also has a whole bunch of new features. There are two new sections, Brand Elements and UI Typography, and with the addition of the Brand Kit, it's going to be even easier to keep everyone on brand. Head on over to the Settings area and search for Brand & Skinning.
Brand Elements - Colours
Here you can add your brand’s colour palette and categorise them into primary, secondary, and tertiary groups. Once you’ve added your colours, they will show in the colour pickers anywhere you can set a colour in Brandworkz, e.g., the skinning tool or CMS areas, as well as be available to publish as part of your Brand Kit or use in CMS pages inside Brandworkz via a new Brand Elements CMS widget.
Brand Elements - Fonts
Up until now, adding your brand’s fonts and typography styles to your system needed a developer's involvement and therefore waiting. Not anymore. You can add your fonts by simply uploading them, selecting from Google fonts, or choosing a system font. The fonts will be auto-tagged with usage types of ‘Web’, ‘Print’ or ‘Office’ depending on their format. Once added, head to the typography area of the same section and add your typography styles so they can be used in the site's UI and your Brand Kit. Remember, if you upload your fonts and want to use them in the UI, you need to add a web-compatible version – woff, woff2 or ttf.
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Brand Elements - Typography
Now that you’ve added your fonts, it's time to set up some typography styles. If you want to create styles to use in the Brandworkz UI, click on Add Style at the top of the screen and choose the “Web” option. Note, if you don’t have any fonts tagged for ‘Web’ usage, you won't see the web choice in the drop-down. Add your styles per your brand guidelines and select which HTML tag it should be used for, e.g., H1 or H2. Once added, they will be available to choose from in the new UI typography section in Brand & Skinning and be part of your Brand Kit and the new Brand Elements CMS widget.
Add your Print and MS Office typography styles so you can share them via your Brand Kit.
Brand Elements - Logos
Upload your brand’s logos to make them available in the public Brand Kit. The system will auto-tag the logos for the appropriate Usage and Background by inspecting the files, but please review these manually after upload. These tags are used to generate filters in the public Brand Kit for end-users to filter down on the correct permutation.
If you have logo variations, you can keep them together by creating groups.
Note that if you have one or more Logo Finders on your site, this new feature is currently unrelated to those.
Skinning WCAG AA/AAA colour contrast checker
Something we get asked a lot is, “Is Brandworkz accessible”. While we aim to make all new features accessible, the colours, you use for the UI play a large part in your site’s accessibility. To help with this, we have added a WCAG checker to check colour combinations—for example, the background colour and text colour used for the asset action bar. We also streamlined the options, so it's clearer and quicker to get on brand. In fact, you can now enter just two colours in the UI Colours section and have all skin-able areas use those. To see how this will look before making it live, you can browse through the sections using the dropdown at the top of the screen. Each section now has a live preview, as well as being able to change the colours for those specific areas.
UI Typography
The new Typography section is where you can map typography styles added under Brand Elements to the main
heading and body styles in your portal’s UI. Use the dropdowns to map styles with corresponding HTML tags to
the different areas and to use in the Rich Text Editors. If you want to add custom formats to the editors, set up
web styles with no HTML tag, and you’ll be able to select them in the Formats field, and they will get applied via
a Span around the selected text. The live preview shows you how your styles will look both in the UI and CMS
areas.
PLEASE NOTE You may use custom CSS for your site created by our customer services team. If you tick the “Use Brand Typography” tickbox at the top of this page and save the skin, this custom CSS will be disabled and may have unwanted effects. Therefore, our customer services team will contact you after the release and work with you to migrate your styles. However, depending on which custom CSS you have in place, it may not be possible to do this until we have additional features implemented under this section.
Brand Kit
Once you have added your Brand’s Elements, it's time to head over to your Brand Kit. This is another new tile that can be found in the Settings area. The Brand Kit is for sharing your brand elements easily with anyone regardless of if they have access to the system as it’s a public webpage. You can choose Brand Elements to exclude and add your brand’s styling. To make the Brand Kit public go to the General tab and enable the “Published” toggle in the “Edit Brand Kit” popup. Once published, a link will show at the top of the Brand Kit. The link is public so that you can share it with anyone.
There is also a new CMS widget called “Brand Elements”, enabling you to embed any of these sections in an
internal/private CMS page. Note that you will need to contact our customer services team to create a new CMS
template with this widget.
Our next major version will focus on improved CMS functionality, so you will be able to do this yourself in the next version.
Updated DAM & Search User Interface
Updated Asset Grid
In both the DAM and Search, we have introduced a flexible grid layout making it more responsive and mobile-friendly. A “grid size slider” has been added to the asset action bar so you can increase/decrease the size of the thumbnails. More information has been added to the thumbnails, such as file size, video duration and application icons, so it's easier to see things at a glance.
Persist Sort Order
Sorting options have been updated and redundant options removed, and the sort order now persists in each
area.
Note that if an admin has set a custom sort order for sub-folders/webpages within a specific folder, this will
take precedence over the user’s choice.
Also note that the sort order persistence in DAM pages vs Search is separate. This is because search results have
an additional “Relevance” sort order, typically the best one for showing relevant results first.
Search facet improvements
The search facets/filters on the left can now be collapsed/expanded in several ways, allowing end-users to get
an overview of the filters available better or get more space for search results:
- You can click on the header of an individual filter to collapse the options below it – e.g., the “Folders” filter.
- You can click “collapse all” top left to collapse the options of all filters – and then optionally click on individual filter headings to expand just those – great if you have lots of filters.
- You can collapse the entire filter area to make more space for results by clicking the double arrows at the bottom of the panel.
Other improvements & bug fixes
- CMS:
- Layout issue with complex CMS pages using tables where the edit view didn’t match the end user view has been fixed
- Numbered and bulleted lists wouldn’t work consistently in some circumstances (requires UI Typography to be enabled)
- DAM:
- The issue with PDFs and AI files, and asset deduplication has been fixed
- The Image and Video transforms admin section has been merged into one and is now called
- Image & Video Download options. You can set their sort order for the download dropdowns using the drag-and-drop handles
- Thumbnail/preview support was added for Sketch and XD files
- Non-mandatory fields are sometimes flagged as mandatory in bulk metadata edit
- Workflow:
- Meta-data wouldn’t be auto-saved in all circumstances in workflow stages
- Logo Finder:
- Asset shortcuts couldn’t be used
- Miscellaneous:
- Admin areas have an updated and more consistent look and feel
- Buttons across the system have been standardised.o Various security fixes