What Are Brand Guidelines?
(And How to Create Them Easily)

If you've ever seen a logo in the wild, you know that brand consistency is crucial. Your once-beautiful design can be positioned poorly, recolored, stretched, paired with the wrong font, applied with the wrong colors. It's a mess.

That's where brand guidelines come in. You can call them a style guide, a brand book, standards, or a brand manual. They can all mean the same thing:

A standard set of rules for how your brand should be presented to the world.

But what's in them, and how do they benefit your organization? This article will explore the importance of brand guidelines, how they are used, who uses them, and the benefits of implementing them effectively.

What Are Brand Guidelines?

Brand guidelines are a set of rules that explain how your brand should be presented. These guidelines typically cover everything from the design of your logo and the color palette used in your branding to the tone of voice in your messaging and the way your content is structured.

Brand guidelines ensure that all of the materials associated with your brand are cohesive and aligned with your brand identity. They are essential for maintaining consistency across various platforms and touchpoints, whether it's your website, social media, advertising, or printed materials.

Most brand guidelines include the following essential sections:

• Logo and all of their variations
• Color Palette and directions on applying color consistently
• Typography including fonts, and typography styles, such as font sizes, line heights, and letter spacing
• Graphic Elements that can support the logo and typography
• Examples of how all of these elements come together in real-world scenarios

Beyond the basics, brand books and style guides can include lots of additional sections, stretching to hundreds of pages to cover nuance and detail in large brand systems. These can include:

• Sub-Brands and how they should be treated as a separate entity
• Translations of the logo, different instructions for different languages.
• Motion Elements to describe how the logo, typography and graphic elements are animated.
• Video and Photography guidance, to give photographic and video content a consistent look and feel
• Applications, or mockups, to give specific guidance across a wide range of examples. This could range from a billboard, to a business card, to a baseball cap.

What Other Brand Guidelines Are Often Included?

Many organisations combine their brand guidelines with a content style guide, which can include messaging guidelines, tone of voice, brand personality and more.

Combining this content can help keep everything in one place. While they might be written by different teams, both the way a brand reads and the way a brand looks play an important role in communicating consistently

Increasingly, brands are also creating digital voice guidelines, which can include things like how to pronounce the brand name, audio identity, and other sounds and music associated with the brand.

Some digital organisations are also creating design systems that can share some content with brand guidelines.

How Are Brand Guidelines Used Day to Day in an Organization?

Brand guidelines make it easy for people in your organisation to access your key brand assets, and ensure that they are used consistently. Many teams will find this useful:

1. Marketing and Advertising Teams Marketing teams rely on brand guidelines to ensure that all promotional materials, advertisements, and campaigns are consistent with the brand's identity. This consistency helps build brand recognition and trust among customers.

2. Content Teams Whether it's blog posts, social media updates, or video content, brand guidelines provide content creators with a clear framework for producing materials that align with the brand's voice and style. This includes all of the visual elements they create day to day.

3. Product Teams Product Designers, Managers and Engineers all build on the core brand guidelines when creating digital products and experiences. Like other teams, they need access to the core brand assets to ensure your digital products are consistently communicating your brand.

Which External Teams Can Benefit From Brand Guidelines?

Agencies, influenceers, manufacturers, retailers and more can all, at some point, be a touchpoint for your brand. Whether they're creating core content for you, or just referencing your brand in their own content, they can beneift from a clear and simple set of guidelines. They might not work with your brand every day, so your guidelines can help them communicate better on your behalf.

Many of these people will have different needs. A manufacturer might need a vector logo, and Pantone or CMYK color references. A retailer might need to know how to display your products in their storefront.

What Are the Benefits of Using Brand Guidelines?

Implementing brand guidelines offers several benefits to your organization:

1. Brand Consistency Brand guidelines ensure that all visual elements, messaging, and other brand assets are used consistently across all platforms. This consistency helps build a strong, recognizable brand identity.

2. Easy Access to Brand Assets With brand guidelines in place, team members and external partners can easily access the correct logos, fonts, color schemes, and other assets they need. This reduces the risk of errors and ensures that your brand is always presented in the best possible light.

3. Secure Access Modern brand guidelines platforms, like Guidelines, offer secure access to your brand assets. Features like password protection or email login ensure that only authorized users can access sensitive content, protecting your brand's integrity.

How to Make Your Own Brand Guidelines (Easily!)

Brand guidelines are an essential tool for any organization that wants to maintain a consistent, recognizable brand identity. They provide a clear framework for how your brand should be presented across all channels, both internally and externally. By using a platform like Guidelines, you can create beautiful, custom brand guidelines that are easily accessible and secure.