Brand guidelines: what they include and who uses them

The print shop asks for your color value, the new freelance designer asks which font to use, and someone in sales copies the logo from an email signature and pastes it into a quotation. You answer every time, and every time the result comes out a little different. After a year these small differences pile up until your company looks like three companies.

Brand guidelines are the reference that answers these questions for you, provided they are written for the people who will use them.

What are brand guidelines?

Brand guidelines, also called a brand book or style guide, are a document that sets the rules for using your identity: the logo, colors, fonts, imagery and writing tone, with examples of correct and incorrect use. The goal is that anyone working in your name can produce consistent design without having to ask you.

The guidelines usually come with a folder of files: every version of the logo in every format, the fonts or their links, and ready-made templates. The document explains the rules, and the files make them easy to follow.

What should brand guidelines include?

The core sections are similar in most guides. How deep each one goes depends on the size of the company and how much material it produces.

The prohibited uses section is one of the most useful: a stretched logo, a logo in an unapproved color, a logo over a busy photo or with a drop shadow. One picture of each mistake saves a lot of back and forth.

The tone of voice section is often skipped, even though your team writes in the company's name every day in replies, proposals and posts. Use it to decide whether you address customers in the singular or plural (a real choice in Arabic), whether you always write in simple Modern Standard Arabic or allow dialect on social media, and how the company name is spelled in Arabic and English. These small details show up in every message your team sends.

Who uses brand guidelines?

Everyone who makes something carrying your name, inside the company and outside it. A common mistake is writing the guide for designers alone, when most everyday material is made by people who are not designers.

• The marketing team and freelancers who design posts and ads.
• Print shops and suppliers of signage and promotional gifts.
• The developers of your website and apps.
• Sales and admin staff who put together presentations and quotations.
• Partners and distributors who place your logo next to theirs.

Each group needs a different part. The print shop wants color values and vector files, while a staff member wants a ready Word or PowerPoint template that needs no reading at all.

How do you get people to actually use the guidelines?

Make the ready-made templates part of the guidelines, and keep the guide and the files in one place everyone knows. A guide that is emailed once and then forgotten changes nothing in day-to-day material.

Write the rules in plain language and put a visual example next to each one. A sentence like "use white space in a balanced way" means nothing to someone designing a post in a hurry, while a picture of a correct post next to a wrong one is understood in a second.

Make one person in the company responsible for the guidelines, someone who answers questions and keeps the files updated. Without that person, people start copying old templates out of their inboxes.

Do your website and app need separate guidelines?

They need an extension of the guidelines written for developers: color values, spacing, font sizes, buttons and form fields as code or ready components. This is usually called a design system.

Without it, the developer improvises on every new page, and the site ends up with five button styles and four shades of the primary color. If your company is building an internal system or an app, ask for this part along with the identity from the start.

When should you update your brand guidelines?

Update them when new material appears that the guide does not cover, or when you notice the team repeating the same mistake. A repeated mistake usually means a rule is unclear or a template is missing.

Small, regular updates work better than rewriting the guide every few years. If you find the guidelines no longer describe your company at all, read signs your company needs a rebrand. For details on colors and fonts, read how to choose brand colors.

We write brand guidelines together with ready templates and files as part of our branding and design service. Send us your current guide or whatever files you have and we will tell you what it is missing to be usable.

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Written by the Visual Innovate team, the people who build, host and follow up systems, websites and apps for our clients in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Egypt.