Brand Guidelines
Brand guidelines serve as an indispensable tool for maintaining brand consistency. Regardless of the size of your business, these guidelines are paramount in ensuring your brand operates efficiently. In their absence, your brand’s identity can quickly get messy. Internal and external uses of the brand can incorrectly use the identity or even look to put their own take on the identity design. What you’re left with is a confused audience, who without that consistency in the identity system, will be left with a negative impression of your brand.
Brand guidelines can run from 20 pages to 200+ pages depending on the business and how the brand is used. Every company is different and will require differing levels of control of the brand identity system.
Perhaps you’ve grown from an initial start-up with a logo and basic brand presence and you’re now looking to grow the brand and tighten up or produce a much stronger identity system.
I have experience designing brand identity guidelines for everything from start-ups, all the way through to multi-national companies, having been part of a team developing several brand guidelines for Coca-Cola.
Brand guidelines can cover the following:
- Logo usage
- Logo sizing
- Logo clear space
- Incorrect usage
- Colour palette
- Tone of voice
- Brand archetype
- Typography usage and settings
- Photography style
- Incorrect photography style
- Iconography
- Table and graph styling
- Brand examples
- Pattern style
- Specific marketing element settings