The Importance of Brand Guidelines

As my children have gotten older and started to play organized sports, one of the first things you teach them, regardless of the sport, is the rules. Before they can begin to understand and grow in any sport, they need to learn the guidelines and expectations. In understanding what’s allowed, they need to learn what’s not allowed.

Most people wouldn’t try to build something without first clearly understanding the directions; why would you try to build and scale a brand without brand guidelines?

One of the backbones of a trustworthy and recognizable brand is consistency and authenticity. Across all internal and external touchpoints, consistency is important in how you look, act, speak, and represent the brand. Brand guidelines help maintain that consistency.

Great brands don’t have to slap their logo or name all over everything. The colors, typography, photography, voice, and use of negative space are just a few examples of brand elements that, when applied consistently, help identify some of the world’s best-known brands.

On NPR’s How I Built This podcast, I heard Whitney Wolfe, founder of Bumble, say:

“I really believe anybody can copy a product…with the right support, somebody could rebuild any piece of technology, it’s engineering. However, you cannot just copy someone’s brand and become them. There has to be authenticity when you build a brand, and there has to be true purpose.”

A company’s products and services can always be copied, but the brand is unique, and brand guidelines help protect that brand as you grow.

No two companies’ brand guidelines will be the same; they can be relatively brief or extremely lengthy and detailed. Depending on the brand’s needs and size, guidelines may include a variety of elements. However, regardless of the need or the size of the company, all brand guidelines will typically include these components:

• Logo

• Colors

• Typography

• Photography & Iconography

• Voice

• Usage Examples

LOGO

A logo is one of the most recognizable components of a brand and generally has prominent placement on a variety of channels. Representing the brand’s logo differently on different media can create confusion and brand dilution.

In the logo section of the brand guidelines, it’ll typically address allowable color variations of the logo as well as the clear space needed around it. It’s equally important to say and show what not to do. For example, don’t adjust the scale of the elements within the logo, don’t add any effects to the logo like beveling and embossing, don’t change the colors of the logo, etc.

COLOR PALETTE

The color palette is an integral part of brand identity. Consistent use of the color palette both reinforces brand cohesiveness and also communicates a specific feeling and emotion to the audience. Engaging brand experts ensures appropriate color theory is taken into account when developing the color palette.

A general rule of thumb is to have between 3 and 5 distinct colors in the primary color palette. Shades and tints are created from the primary palette to provide greater variability while maintaining a consistent brand expression. A secondary or tertiary color palette provides even more options, such as differentiating product lines or services.

TYPOGRAPHY

Many times, font and typography are used interchangeably, and while they’re related, they’re different. A typeface is a set of one or more fonts that share common design features. Each font of a typeface has a specific weight, style, condensation, width, slant, italicization, etc.

Typography is a powerful brand tool that should never detract from the message but instead allow the reader to focus on the content, not on how it looks. It should go unnoticed and should feel comfortable to the reader. Typography in brand guidelines should establish a hierarchy within the content, using different weights, sizes, and colors to convey what content is most important to the reader. Finally, it should create harmony within the document and cohesion throughout your brand, helping to build brand recognition beyond the logo and color palette.

PHOTOGRAPHY and ICONOGRAPHY

Chances are, you don’t have full-time designers and photographers on staff. For this reason and others, it’s important to clearly define your expectations in the brand guidelines for these elements. Doing so ensures that partners and agencies can effectively and creatively create content for you that is consistent with the brand.

Visual elements like photography and iconography are strategic tools in your brand guidelines. Similar to typography, visual brand assets should always reinforce the message, and each element should evoke and reinforce the brand’s mission, vision, values, and purpose.

VOICE

Beyond the press release boilerplate and your mission, vision, and values, all important and definitely worth including, your brand guidelines should describe how you want your brand to sound. Think about what types of adjectives you’d use to describe the brand. Are you friendly or formal, authoritative or passive?

In this section of the guidelines, you can clearly define how products and services are worded or phrased, what competitors can and cannot be mentioned, restricted words or phrases, and what topics the brand can and should write about.

In my opinion, voice is one of the hardest branding elements to nail down in your brand guidelines, but it’s crucial as that voice will be used in website copy, press releases, social media posts, blog posts, marketing collateral, video scripts, and all internal and external communications.

USAGE EXAMPLES

The final piece of your brand guidelines should include a sampling of the examples we’ve discussed. In this section, demonstrate what acceptable and unacceptable logo placement looks like and be able to demonstrate what an acceptable brand photo is and isn’t. Provide examples of the website and marketing copy to establish how the typography should appear.

The text in your brand guidelines will undoubtedly answer many initial questions, but clearly seeing the expectations through various examples would hopefully leave little doubt and clear up any ambiguity. When you partner with various creatives like graphic designers or photographers, seeing visual examples of your brand expectations is invaluable and can prevent multiple tiresome rounds of revisions, reducing unnecessary work.

YOU NEED BRAND GUIDELINES

Brand guidelines are essential for companies of any size and have many different uses, everything from creating and designing brand assets like packaging, social media posts, website, and marketing collateral, to sharing with agencies and franchisees to maintain consistency with the brand as you grow, and also internally with employees, especially when you consider the impact of employee advocacy programs.

Whether you’re a company of 1 or 100,000, you need brand guidelines.