The six elements which all brand guidelines should have

When kickstarting a branding project, creating new brand identities, or undertaking a rebrand, all of your brand elements should be outlined in one document, so that everyone involved in creating and maintaining your brand image—from copywriters, freelance illustrators, and in-house graphic designers—can consistently understand, create, and communicate your brand.

Today, brands go far beyond existing as mere logos and products. They are personalities that tell stories, offer lifestyles, create communities, build networks, and forge deep-rooted, long-lasting relationships with their customers. As consumers’ attitudes towards brands shift, companies are beginning to recognise the importance of holistic brand guidelines that encompass everything from their company logo to colour charts, brand personality and tone of voice—driving brand cohesion, integrity and equity.

We know that creating brand clarity and consistency can sometimes be difficult, particularly for start-ups looking to position themselves in competitive markets or businesses that have grown rapidly.

So, in this guide, we’ve pulled together everything you need to know to create and implement a unified, resonant brand identity that can be communicated consistently and stand out in a competitive market.

What are brand guidelines?

Simply put, brand guidelines are a set of rules and principles that define how a brand should look, sound and behave. Guideline documents cover everything from logo usage, fonts, colour palettes, typography, tone of voice, and even a brand’s mission statement, positioning, identity, and values. And if you’re wondering “what is a brand style guide?” well, it’s just another name for brand guidelines.

These guidelines are pulled together in a guidelines document or brand guide, which reinforces how a brand should be communicated across all channels and touchpoints. Essentially, these guidelines are the sum of your brand strategy and act as a central reference point for your brand. They are a practical brand toolkit and should cover everything that anyone interacting with your business might need to know.

They can be used internally and in collaboration with partners to ensure the brand is represented consistently and correctly across the board, and are valuable when executing a successful marketing strategy. A brand’s collaborators and partners should know how to use its assets, convey its personality and communicate its messaging. A guidelines document gives them the tools to do this consistently. With a firm knowledge of brand elements and brand voice, designers, copywriters and developers can all work with the same building blocks.

Chiefly, guidelines ensure that a brand is consistently represented. Why does consistent representation matter? A brand that is deemed honest, ethical and trustworthy by consumers stands a better chance of earning their loyalty and buy-in if it always looks and feels the same wherever they see it.

What do brand guidelines do?

You might think that your logo, tagline, or colour palette are the most important parts of your branding, but unless there’s a brand guidelines document outlining brand standards and ensuring that these elements are connected and congruent, these elements won’t serve your brand’s identity.

Guidelines have many purposes and benefits, which we will discuss throughout this article. Chiefly, though, guideline documents will:

• Ensure brand consistency: Above all else, brand guides maintain a consistent brand image, which is vital when you want to build trust, brand recognition, and customer loyalty.
• Support brand quality: Brand guides help ensure that communications feel unified and professional, and that the quality of their outputs remains the same, across every touchpoint.
• Drive brand integrity: By implementing guidelines, brands can refine their designs to create a distinct look and feel. Following guidelines allows brand strategists to make informed and deliberate decisions when it comes to conveying their brand story.

The big question, what should brand guidelines include?

As with most things, you can opt for more basic models or a more comprehensive approach when designing your own brand guidelines. For smaller start-ups, something easy to navigate is often the best route, whereas larger brands will have more touchpoints and their guidelines will need to be more comprehensive.

Typically, brand identity guidelines will focus on a brand’s proposition and visual and verbal brand identity, with the average brand guide covering:

• Vision, values, brand story and essence
• Naming and messaging
• Visual brand assets
• Tone of voice/brand messaging
• Examples of the brand in use: external and internal brand communication

This may be more applicable for brands wishing to adopt a more comprehensive approach to their brand identity guidelines, but we also find that it’s useful to include sections for:

• Audience personas: This means having a deep understanding of who you are creating your content and communications for. Rather than focusing on specific individuals, personas seek to understand the main problems, fears, and ambitions of your target audience. This helps brand experts and marketers understand — and, more importantly, relate to — their target audience, and will help them deliver value through their marketing materials and communications.
• Accessibility: This one is actually relevant to all brands. Creating brands that are accessible and inclusive has never been more important, so we’d recommend building this into your guidelines from the start. You should aim to include guidance on creating accessible material, key considerations, and an accessible colour combination chart that looks something like this. If you’re in a highly regulated industry or one that needs to follow web accessibility guidelines, make sure your colour palette and usage guidance support accessible design.
• Asset library: Also known as a brand library or digital asset management (DAM) library, an asset library houses all of your brand’s assets. It’s a very handy contact sheet that highlights where people can access the full scope of your brand toolkit, and familiarise themselves with the assets they will need, use and implement.
• Further guidance: We’d recommend leaving no stone unturned and being as thorough and informative as possible. Be sure to let readers know exactly where to go for further guidance, contact details, or any additional information they might need. It’s your job to point them in the right direction and leave nothing unclear.

Brand guidelines often cover five broad areas: strategy, messaging, visual identity, verbal identity and examples of the brand in use. Below, we break these down into six practical elements that most brand guides should include.

What should be included in a brand guideline template?

1. Brand proposition

This is a core component of all brand development. Creating a distinctive positioning statement that reveals your brand’s outlook, vision and philosophy, while reflecting what your customers aspire to, is vital to your brand’s success.

Be sure to include your brand proposition statement in your guidelines, covering your core values, personality, vision, and purpose. A simple summary of what sits at the heart of your business will make your brand feel more human, authentic and relatable, and will help new users understand and communicate it.

2. Logo

Logos are just one aspect of your overall branding, although, as the first visual cue that customers come to recognise you through, they are incredibly important. It’s important that your logo is consistently represented across different media and devices; otherwise, it could risk diminishing your brand identity.

When it comes to guidelines, you should include:

• how your logo should and shouldn’t be used
• the size and proportions of your logo
• requirements regarding exclusion zones (clear space around the logo)
• colourways, online and offline

Most companies have several logo variations depending on the situation, such as a large-scale, detailed logo for bigger treatments, like full-spread advertisements, and smaller logos for online use, social media icons and letterheads.

It’s important that your logo is fully flexible and that your guideline document includes your logo design in its full spectrum of formats: a version without the tagline, a version without the symbol, and so on. You will also need to show your logo against different brand colours and in a single colour.

Logo spacing is also important. The space around your logo (exclusion zone) is often as important as the design itself. It should be displayed with ‘x-height’ guides, which show how much space should be around the logo at all times. There should also be guidance on the minimum size your logo can appear.

3. Typefaces

The fonts you use are a huge part of your visual identity. You’ll need to decide whether you’re going to use a single typeface across your media choices or whether you’re going to use different typefaces for online and offline communications. Defining this eliminates guesswork for designers and ensures that your communications are consistent and clean across the board.

In your guidelines, be sure to identify:

• Your choice of fonts (styles, families, and where to access them)
• Appropriate applications of these fonts:
  • Subheadings
  • Headings
  • Slogans
  • Captions
• Text alignment options:
  • Left
  • Right
  • Centred
• Spacing considerations:
  • Tracking and kerning ratio
• Sizing
• Offline and online usages

4. Colour palette

All brands should have a defined set of colours that they use when developing a visual identity. Your brand guidelines should distinguish primary and secondary colour palettes.

Make sure that your toolkit includes information on reproducing your chosen colours accurately and effectively, which will mean focusing on colour values or colour codes for:

• Digital: HEX and RGB (red, blue, and green)
• Print: CMYK values and Pantone colour matches.

Remember, your brand’s colour palette will be used across various marketing channels, from brochures to your website and social media accounts, so consider the colour variations between digital and physical materials.

5. Imagery

Photography, illustration, iconography, and infographics can play a critical role in your brand identity. Including image style guidelines covering all your design elements in your overall guide ensures that a consistent photographic or illustrative style is established from the start.

There are a few ways you can approach imagery in your brand toolkit. For instance:

• Best practice examples: Include examples of imagery in a variety of contexts that performed well for your brand in the past.
• Aspirations: If you don’t have the right examples for your brand yet, showcase potential imagery to give you a set of guidelines to follow (it’s important to make sure you always seek the image creator’s permission, though).
• Include examples of what you don’t want to see: Collecting images that do not convey the brand image you want to project and explaining why they are not suitable can also help.

6. Verbal identity and brand voice

Your brand’s tone of voice strongly impacts the way customers associate and connect with your brand. A tone of voice section should do two things:

• Introduce your brand’s tone of voice and tonal values, explaining what they stand for and how they support your brand and company mission.
• Give detailed, practical support to the people creating content for different channels.

When making your guideline document, ensure the design of the brand guide matches the visual tone of your company. A house style guide is a brilliant tool when it comes to aligning your visual tone and verbal tone. This covers everything from email etiquette to content marketing to slogan use, ensuring consistency across internal and external brand communications.

Show examples of best practice, for example, messaging that has worked well for you in the past. A list of do’s and don’ts is a great way to break down what works and what doesn’t. Choose specific words that you do and don’t like in relation to your brand, brand-specific phrases or copy (such as calls to action), keywords to use (and to avoid), and writing style (first-person, informal, direct, etc.).

Your brand guidelines should…

• Inform: Fundamentally, this is what your guidelines are here to do. The guide’s job is to tell everyone who reads it what your brand essence is and how to communicate it. It will inform the use of everything, from your logo to your brand story, and even your social media marketing campaigns.
• Inspire: Above merely informing, you still want to engage and stimulate your various audiences, whether they’re employees, stakeholders, or customers. Your brand elements should breathe life into your business, transforming the functional business of a company into a personality.
• Enforce: Your guidelines need to enforce your brand identity, ensuring that every aspect of your branding journey is consistently on brand.

The best brand guidelines examples: businesses that get it right

Instagram

Instagram is a very visual social media platform, and the brand’s visual elements speak to that directly. Its guidelines also prioritise the visual experience, showing how each brand element works in motion. The guidelines reflect Instagram’s global community and highly visual platform. Its recognisable gradient, updated colour palette and custom typeface help express the platform’s visual, energetic and creative personality. The guidelines also show how its typography supports its brand personality by presenting technical information in a way that still feels distinctly Instagram.

Duolingo

Duolingo’s brand guidelines go into detail about how to use Duo, its iconic owl character and one of the most recognisable parts of the company’s marketing. The guidelines also show how its logo works alongside Duo and reflects the brand’s personality. Including these clear links emphasises the cohesion the brand aims for with its visual elements and shows designers how to inject the brand’s playful personality across all common use cases.

Uber

Uber has a thorough style guide that explains how to communicate its brand through logo, colour, composition, iconography, illustration, photography, tone of voice, typography, and motion.

Its brand page provides an overview of each of these elements, alongside examples of how the brand uses them for speedy insights. Uber’s brand guidelines are user-friendly and well-organised, helping users access what they need without needing to scroll through numerous pages of content.

Adobe

Adobe’s highly informative guidelines provide detailed insights into every single brand element available for use. It’s available as a downloadable PDF. Because the people using its guidelines are most likely to be designers, the document is rich in detail and leaves little to the imagination. It’s great for answering detailed practical questions and accounts for the wide range of contexts its branding might be used in.

Netflix

Netflix’s branding is synonymous with online streaming. It houses its brand assets on a dedicated website, with detailed guidance on using its wordmark and symbols. This is especially useful for partners using the Netflix branding in their content or production. It’s clear, concise, and provides visual examples for every rule.

However, Netflix also requires you to request access and create an account to see the full set of guidelines, putting brand governance front and centre. Doing this protects the company’s brand elements and ensures control over their use stays firmly with them.

Are brand guidelines really that important?

Yes – they are essential.

Whether you’re a fledgling start-up or a global corporation, brand guidelines are critical to helping your brand work effectively. Brand books and toolkits communicate the essence of your brand and drive consistency, both internally and externally.

Above all else, strong and consistent branding helps to clarify what your brand stands for and create a strong brand identity. Informative and flexible guidelines act as a template guide and allow you to communicate your brand’s purpose, personality and promise.

You want customers to recognise your brand no matter where they see it: in a magazine, on their phone, or on TV. Your branding is the beating heart of your business, and brand guidelines are integral to producing consistent messaging and cultivating brand unity. Guidelines help to:

• Aid brand recognition: This is the most obvious reason why businesses need brand guidelines. The consistency that guidelines create means that brands are instantly recognisable to customers without having to introduce who they are and what they do.
• Forge long-standing relationships: The connection between brands and their customers is maintained through consistency. Without consistency, brands run the risk of seeming inauthentic and losing customer trust.
• Eliminate confusion: Knowing what to expect from a brand will often mean that customers are willing to pay the premium for their services because they trust it.
• Reduce unnecessary costs: Knowing exactly what you need will limit unnecessary spending. Guidelines can mean that budgetary spending becomes more efficient.
• Guide employees: This is one of the most practical reasons to create guidelines. Brand books ensure that your employees are always using your brand in the correct way: the right shade of green, the right tagline, the right font, the right size logo, and so on. If you have a new starter or your marketing manager is out of the office, having a set of brand guidelines means that the right branding is easily accessible to everyone, and that everyone knows how to use it properly.

You can increase the efficiency of your creative teams and ensure brand consistency with a practical set of branding guidelines. We’d recommend compiling these rules in a clear, user-friendly format that designers, writers and wider teams can easily navigate. This will give designers and writers a great reference tool to help them speak with the same creative voice, and your customers will identify and trust your brand more readily when they see consistent, creative output.

We can guide you through your branding guidelines

If you’re thinking about rebranding or need support creating brand identity guidelines, we’re here to help.

Get in touch to discuss how we can help you maintain a strong, cohesive and distinctive brand through a set of identity guidelines that get to the heart of your business and consistently communicate your promise.