Brand-building is not a one-time exercise. Every time you present your brand to customers is an opportunity to reinforce your brand identity—or dilute it.
“It builds trust in your customers if they feel like you have a clear, consistent point of view,” says Ky Allport, creative director of branding agency Outline. According to Ky, the best way to maintain a consistent brand identity is to create a thoughtful and comprehensive brand guide.
“A lot of independent brands are raising the bar for what is expected of a brand,” Ky says. Two such brands are Omsom and Heyday Canning Co., both Outline clients in the food space. With more small businesses getting serious about their branding, the little things count with consumers.
“It’s really important to put thought into all of the small details that actually add up to a really compelling experience,” Ky says.
To ensure you have all the details in place, learn what goes into beautiful brand guidelines, then use an easy-to-follow template to create your own.
What is a brand guide?
A brand guide is a set of rules a business creates for how it presents itself to the public, including its visual and design aesthetic, voice, and tone. It dictates the acceptable use of your logo, your specific brand color palettes and fonts, and the tone of your communications.
According to Ky, a brand guide—also known as a brand book, brand kit, or style guide—usually takes the form of a PDF with different sections for the brand’s logos, fonts, colors, illustrations, and photography.
“More than identifying what the pieces are, brand guidelines’ job is to show you how to use those things,” Ky says. “Because you can have a set of colors and a set of fonts and do completely different things with them.”
Brand guidelines vs. brand identity
Brand guidelines are a set of rules that help you communicate your brand identity. Your brand’s identity consists of the choices you make about how you want your brand to look and sound in the world. According to Margaret Pilarski, head of strategy at Outline, the brand guide is the roadmap for presenting that identity. That’s why you’ll sometimes see a brand style guide referred to as “brand identity guidelines.”
Why create brand guidelines?
- You’re designing (or redesigning) your website
- You’re working with external partners, like an agency or freelancers
- You’re hiring new employees
- Other people are using your logo or other brand assets
Brand rules are the best way to keep your brand consistent across channels, which helps build trust with customers.
“You’re creating a recognizable environment so that your shopper is confident and they feel like part of your community,” Margaret says.
A brand guideline serves as a way to unite various teams.
“What you’re doing on your website matches what you’re doing on social and how you’re sending your email letter that looks consistent with your product label,” Ky says. “And the brand guidelines is one resource that all of those teams share.”
Brand guidelines should exactly that, however—guidelines. You should retain a level of flexibility and always give yourself space to experiment with your brand.
Here are some instances when you may need to create brand guidelines:
You’re designing (or redesigning) your website
For ecommerce brands, your website is everything. Ky recommends finalizing your brand guidelines before designing your website to make the process smoother.
“A lot of clients reach out to us thinking that they just need a website design, and we’ll actually start evaluating their brand foundations and find out they don’t have a full brand toolkit,” Ky says. “If you don’t have that established to start with, the website can only do so much.”
You’re working with external partners, like an agency or freelancers
You and your employees might be familiar with how to use your brand assets, but as soon as you work with people outside your organization, you should provide them with brand guidelines to keep everyone on the same page.
“Any team that’s going to be communicating on behalf of the brand or creating additional assets needs to know what the core [brand] foundation is, both from a visual and verbal perspective,” Ky says.
A freelance copywriter, for example, needs to know your brand voice, tone, and target audience. A graphic designer should be familiar with your brand colors and how to use your logo and any other design elements.
If you don’t already have a solid brand guide, external partners may request that you create one before working together. Margaret says sometimes Outline will receive referrals from marketing agencies whose clients are missing brand guidelines.
“The marketing agency will send the client our way, like, ‘Please help them. Don’t change the brand or build a whole new thing, but tighten it up, get it together.’”
You’re hiring new employees
A brand guidelines document can help new employees get up to speed. For example, your brand guidelines might include information about tone that would be useful for a new customer service representative.
All the important information about your brand is consolidated in one place, enabling your reps to speak confidently on behalf of your business.
Other people are using your logo or other brand assets
If other entities—like another business you’re collaborating with, an organization you sponsor, or sub-brands—use your logo or other brand elements, you should share your logo usage guidelines with them.
Many larger brands post brand logo usage guidelines publicly. Logo usage guidelines are just one part of a full brand guide.
Elements of a brand guide
Every brand guide is a little different, but most include sections for these elements:
Logos
Your logo is one of the most important aspects of your brand’s visual identity. Most brand guides devote multiple pages to rules surrounding the acceptable use of their logos, including which marks to use for different situations.
For each of your brand’s logos, include rules for resizing, clearspace, and color options. You may also want to include examples of how not to use your logo.
Typography
Your brand guide will contain a suite of fonts and guidelines for when and how to use each.
For example, Heyday Sans, the custom typeface Outline created for Heyday Canning Co., has two widths that can be mixed and matched.
“The idea behind the font was that it would have this variation in width, so it can get a little bit wider, it could get a little more condensed, and then you can stack it in this kind of playful way,” Ky says.
Color palette
A consistent color scheme can immediately orient customers in your brand world. For Heyday Canning Co., Outline chose colors that “feel like they could have come from the natural environment, so nothing that feels artificial,” Ky says.
In your brand guide, give each color a name and include its hex code. In addition to a color palette, you’ll include guidelines for how to use each of your brand colors, including the color hierarchy, approved color combinations, and which colors should never go together.
As for how many colors to include, it depends.
“When you are designing a brand for a physical product, as part of the packaging, you have to figure out how you’re going to distinguish between the different flavors or variations,” Ky says.
For Heyday, the number of different flavors played a key role in determining the number of brand colors.
“We knew we wanted this family of products to have a really fun relationship to one another on the shelf, so it wouldn’t just be a single color across the board,” Ky says.
Imagery
Photographs, illustrations, and icons all make up part of your brand’s visual language. Your brand guide is a great place to explain the style for any photography or illustrations used on your website or on a physical product.
Photographers and illustrators should be able to look at the examples in your brand guide to create new images that are consistent with your brand aesthetics. If you don’t have photographs or illustrations yet, you can use other brands’ as a visual reference.
Audience
Your target audience will inform what type of content you create and how you present it.
“We always encourage our clients to really know who they’re talking to,” Ky says. “Be clear about that, because you’re going to have a lot more success from your true brand champions than if you’re trying to be everything for everyone.”
Your brand guide is a great place to describe your audience for collaborators.
For example, Omsom’s audience is first- and second-generation Asian Americans.
“I think we did something really powerful in that we really centered the first- and second-generation Asian American community at a time when many brands were overlooking this audience,” Omsom cofounder Vanessa Pham says on Shopify Masters.
Voice and tone
The voice and tone decisions outlined in your brand guide will inform your copywriting, from the text on your product packaging to your website, social media accounts, and blog posts.
Voice and tone go hand-in-hand, but it’s important to understand the difference.
“Your voice is constant. Your brand should always sound like your brand, regardless of the channel or situation,” Margaret says. “Tone, on the other hand, is how your voice adapts to different situations. For example, the tone you use with a customer who’s just made a sale is different from how you’d speak to a frustrated customer.”
Grammar and style conventions
Grammar and style conventions are the details of how you communicate your brand’s voice. For example, if your brand’s voice is serious and authoritative, you might want to stay away from slang. On the other hand, if your brand’s point of view is youthful, some slang might not be a bad thing.
If you work with writers, editors, or copy editors, they’ll expect guidelines on everything from whether or not your brand uses the serial comma to your preferred style manual (usually AP or Chicago). These might seem like small details, but your brand copy will look sloppy—and potentially confuse readers—if it’s inconsistent. A brand style guide ensures your brand copy will look the same everywhere.
How to create a brand guide
- Decide if you want to work with an agency or DIY with a brand guidelines template
- Create a mood board
- Hone in on your brand personality
- Set usage guidelines
Your brand should be unique, but the process of creating brand guidelines is often the same.
“For a lot of people, it’s getting all of their thoughts and ideas out, pointing at other brands they think are doing something good or bad, and using those data points to figure out what this brand’s stakes in the ground are, and then putting some rules around that and organizing it,” Margaret says.
Here’s how to create your own brand guide:
1. Decide if you want to work with an agency or DIY with a brand guidelines template
Many founders are not graphic designers and choose to partner with a branding agency to build their brand identity and create brand guidelines.
“If you have the idea, but you don’t have someone that can extract it, you have a missing piece in your brand-creation process,” Andrew Benin, founder of olive oil brand Graza, says on Shopify Masters. (Andrew worked with brand agency Gander to bring Graza to life.)
If you decide to create your own brand guidelines, a brand style guide template is a great way to make sure you include all the necessary elements. Brand guidelines templates typically include editable fields for your brand colors, logos, and fonts.
2. Create a mood board
Whether you work with an agency or an in-house creative team—or create brand guidelines yourself using a brand guidelines template—a mood board can be a helpful starting point for deciding how you want your brand to look and sound. You may want to create two folders of images—one for references that align with how you want your brand to look, and another for how you don’t want it to look.
Create a document where you can brainstorm ideas for how you want your brand to sound, including thoughts about your audience and brand voice, potential taglines and slogans, value propositions, and words to avoid. Your brand’s mission statement and values can help guide you toward what feels right.
Your visual and written references will become the foundation for your brand identity.
“Usually how a branding process starts is you get to know the brand, the founder, maybe there’s a moodboard to help inform the direction, and then we’ll put together a concept, which would include like logos, color, visuals and typography—all the key assets—to give you an idea of how the brand could express itself like in the world,” Ky says.
3. Hone in on your brand personality
Your brand personality informs how you will make decisions regarding your brand.
“The one thing that we’re always looking for is, ’Does the brand have a distinct point of view?’” Ky says. “And then that point of view gets translated into both visual and verbal assets.”
For example, Heyday Canning Co. cofounder Kat Kavner had a clear vision for the brand.
“We want Heyday to feel like your friend that happens to be really good at cooking that loves to invite you over for dinner and is kind of cooking alongside you in the kitchen,” Kat says in an interview with Shopify Masters. This voice not only informs Heyday’s written copy, but also the visual elements that define the brand.
4. Set usage guidelines
Based on your brand voice, set guidelines regarding how to use the elements of your brand identity—like your logo, color palette, and fonts. Maybe you already have these assets and just need to nail down usage guidelines, like how much space to leave around your logo. If you haven’t created your logo or decided on your brand fonts and colors, you can write your guidelines as you go.
The decisions you make regarding how to use your assets should be intentional.
“There should be an underlying system that someone reading the brand guidelines could then take and utilize to create various other things on behalf of the brand,” Ky says.
Brand guide examples
NASA
In 1976, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) released a new logo along with a 60-page-long manual detailing how to use the logo on everything from letterhead to cars.
It also includes NASA’s brand fonts (Helvetica, Futura, Garamond, and Times Roman) and the intention behind each. For example, “The precision letterforms [of Futura] have a technological character and make it a natural for certain NASA projects.”
Your brand guide might not be as long as NASA’s and probably won’t include specifications for using your logo on spacecraft, but it’s still a classic brand guide example. “NASA is kind of idolized,” Ky says.
Slack
Instead of a physical or PDF brand guide, instant-messaging software company Slack has a brand center with separate web pages for brand values, colors, typography, writing, brand shapes, emoji, illustration, photography, icons, user interface (UI), and swag.
The typography section in particular is a great example of how to communicate your typography hierarchy. Slack uses one font for headlines and another for body copy, and its brand center clearly illustrates how to use these two fonts for different situations.
Heyday Canning Co.
Outline created Heyday Canning Co.’s brand guide based on the vision cofounder Kat Kavner had for the brand’s persona.
“We had this foundation of knowing who we are and what we stood for and what we wanted to convey that we were then able to take to our design partner and actually brief them on creating our brand identity, our logo and colors and fonts, and then eventually the packaging,” Kat tells Shopify Masters. “That upfront work really helped them understand what we were trying to do and what we wanted to create.”
The 23-page brand guide Outline created for Heyday includes guidelines on how to use the Heyday wordmark and emblem, plus examples of which fonts to use for headlines, quotes, and small data. There’s also a page with examples of unapproved uses and an explanation of what’s wrong with each example. If you’re going to include unapproved uses, make it clear by including an X mark (or another visual indicator).
Omsom
For Margaret and Ky, it’s important that a brand guide be a branded document itself.
“Omsom’s brand guidelines could only be Omsom’s,” Margaret says of the 41-page guide Outline prepared for the Asian sauce brand in 2020. “They look like Omsom made them in Omsom world.”
Omsom’s wordmark is meant to evoke flames and take up physical space, just as its brand voice is fiery and proud. “We wanted to echo the brand’s concept in its visuals and then reiterate that in the brand guidelines, because you might not know that, even though you could feel it,” Margaret says.
The brand guide highlights how seemingly small decisions all serve to express Omsom’s brand story. For example, guidelines for clearspace include: “The logomark should maintain tight clearspace in order to consistently convey its maximalist personality.”
Including explanations like this in your brand guide will help get buy-in from your team and external partners.
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Brand guidelines FAQ
What is in a brand guide?
A brand guide should include instructions for how a brand presents itself both visually and in writing, including how to use logos, typefaces, colors, and graphics, as well as preferred language. A brand guideline template can help ensure you include all the necessary elements.
Are brand guidelines the same as a style guide?
The terms “brand guidelines” and “style guide” are sometimes used interchangeably, but “style guide” can also refer to a document of guidelines for written content only, while brand guidelines typically include rules for both visual and written elements. Brand style guides are usually the same thing as brand guidelines.
Do you need a brand guide?
Most businesses will need to create a brand guide at some point to ensure brand consistency. You might need a brand guide if you are creating a website or physical product, working with an agency or freelancers, or hiring new employees.
How long should a brand guide be?
A full-length brand guide can be anywhere from 15 to 80 pages, according to Ky Allport and Margaret Pilarski of branding agency Outline. A preliminary brand guide could consist of “just a few pages that has their logo, their colors, their fonts, but not necessarily a lot of guidelines on how to use all of those things,” says Ky.
