Why do brand guidelines matter?
A brand guide provides consistency. Without certain rules, creating a memorable brand identity is hard to achieve.
Inconsistent design styles and communication approaches will make your brand identity look diluted and will diminish the brand’s credibility.
What is there to know before creating your brand book?
A high quality brand identity book is the collaborative result of teamwork. Managers, designers and copywriters are all involved in the process.
The brand guidelines should be balanced and they should stem out of the brand identity structure.
What should your brand manual include?
Each and every brand book is unique. However, we can agree upon a structure that has been generally found in most brand guides we have studied.
The structure usually includes 2 or 3 main sections:
- Brand Description
- It includes brand vision, mission, values and target audience
- Visual guidelines
- Logo: color, placement, variations, size and proportions, examples of logo misuse
- Brandmark: color, when and where to use it
- Tagline: where it should be displayed
- Colors: primary brand colors as well as secondary colors
- Typography: corporate fonts for headlines and body texts, etc.
- Photography: photography style, image guidelines
- Other graphics: icons, patterns, textures
- Communication guidelines
- Language: the languages your brand speaks and communicates
- Grammar and formatting: abbreviations, numbers, capitalization, acronyms, times and titles
- Readability: intricate sentences or short, simple ones
- Style: technical/ non-technical; formal/casual/slang
- Tone of voice: logical / emotional; intimate / distant; serious / humorous, etc.
- Email: email structure, email signature
- Editorial style guide: guidelines, formatting and structure for blog posts
- Social Media: purpose, posting times, post types, for each social channel
How is your brand book designed?
First and foremost, at least an initial draft of the copy is highly necessary. The copy might suffer several alterations after or during the design process, but it sets a starting point design wise.
After ensuring full understanding of the brand vision, several brand book examples you like, may come in handy in order to ensure we are on the same page. It is going to help us understand what your preferences are and how you would like your brand book to look like: big type and short paragraphs or maybe a more compact view? Minimalistic or colorful layouts?
The brand book itself should be a reflection of the brand guidelines. Take the time to make it as visually appealing as possible.
The guidelines that are presented in your brand book must be reflected by the book itself. The book should be visually attractive and not cluttered. Take the time to make it visually appealing.
What does a brand manual look like?
Check out our brand manual examples below.
Keep in mind that brands are for humans, like humans: they evolve and change over time. It’s highly important to keep your brand book updated and always make sure the rules reflect the current standards and guidelines.
As a final thought, remember that we are here to help with creating your unique brand manual.