Media Kit

People who write about a company are always working against a deadline. A reporter filing in the afternoon gets in touch that morning, and what they need at that hour isn't an explanation — it's files. A logo, one product screenshot, a two-line description of the company, and numbers like founding year and headcount.

When none of that is ready, the remaining two hours go into hunting for it. The marketer asks the designer for a logo, the designer is in a meeting, and somebody ends up cropping one out of an old slide deck. That stale logo and a low-resolution screenshot land in the article and sit in search results for years. Misspelled company names and a headcount two years out of date arrive the same way.

A media kit exists to remove that round trip. Rather than sending files on request, you leave them where anyone can take them, which is why most companies put up a page called "press" or "media" and host the kit there. For this to work, the material you want used has to be sitting there in advance. What's needed gets found one way or another, and anything you haven't posted gets filled in with whatever is old and available.

Six bundles usually go in, and one test decides what qualifies: can somebody finish an article or a slide without asking you anything?

1. Logo files — a vector format that stays sharp at any size alongside a standard image format, split into versions for light and dark backgrounds. If the layout changes by placement — horizontal, square — include those too.
2. Product images — three or four high-resolution shots of the real interface. Clean up the sample data inside the screen first; screenshots taken from an internal account with employee names or real customer names still visible are a common accident.
3. People photos — the founders and whoever speaks for the company. Articles often need a face, and without one the writer pulls a social profile picture.
4. Company description — written at three lengths: one line, three lines, one paragraph. Different placements allow different amounts of room. Have one person write all three so they don't say different things.
5. Facts — founding year, who runs it, where it's based, headcount, funding history. When you list a stage like Series A, give the date and amount with it. These change often, so print the date they were last checked next to them.
6. Usage rules and a contact — enough rules to keep people from stretching the logo or recoloring it, plus where to write with questions. Once the rules get long they belong in a brand guideline document that the kit merely links to.

Offer the six as one archive to download, and also leave the individual files loose beside it. Make someone pull 20 MB to get a single logo and they'll go search for an image instead, which puts you back where you started.

The PR or marketing owner assembles it, the designer supplies the files, and the founder signs off on the description. It's less a document one person writes than one person collects. Quarterly review is typical, with immediate fixes whenever something factual changes, like a funding round or a redesign.

Reporters aren't the only readers. In practice four groups come for it.

1. Reporters and editors — looking for an image and a company description to drop into a story. They're the most rushed of the four, and what they can't find here they improvise from whatever turns up.
2. Event organizers — asking for a speaker bio and a logo when the founder is on a program. If a link answers the email, the exchange is over in one message.
3. Partners and customers — putting your logo on an integration page or a case study slide. That's why the usage rules travel with the files.
4. People making content — an industry newsletter or a video channel covering the product takes screenshots from here.

Because the readers split four ways, the material has to be usable rather than persuasive. One question settles it: can someone landing on this page for the first time walk away with what they need in three minutes without asking you anything?

"I'll send the media kit link. The logo and the founder photo are all in there."

Pointing at something already open instead of digging up files to attach to an email.

"The media kit still says 30 people. It needs to say 45."

The bundle has aged out of agreement with the facts.

"This announcement goes out with the press release and the media kit together."

The document carrying the news and the bundle carrying the assets ship as a pair.

At Pagedeck, Ravi owns this page. When the company announced its Series A he sent material to five reporters; three of them wrote back asking for a logo, and the fourth skipped asking and used a two-year-old logo they found by searching. That article is still up.

So Ravi got a logo bundle from Noa, had a new photo of Grace taken, and opened a press page. Every announcement since carries that address at the bottom of the press release, and the requests for logos stopped. His quarterly job is checking two lines: headcount and funding history.

The most common misreading is treating the kit as promotional material. It goes outside the company, so it feels like a document meant to make you look good. The company description fills up with ambitions about changing an industry, and a polished ad image takes the place of a product screenshot. But the reader of this bundle isn't someone to convince — they've already decided to write about you. What they need is confirmed facts and files they can use. Fill it with ambition and the reporter goes elsewhere for numbers, and material you don't control ends up in the article.

Treating it as a one-time build is the other common mistake. A folder of files feels less perishable than a document, but the most-used items here go stale the fastest: headcount, funding stage, product screens. Redesign the interface without replacing the images and a screen that no longer exists runs in an article — and readers who come looking for it end up on somebody else's product.