Brand guidelines are an easy component of your visual identity system to overlook. You already spent money on your logo, website, maybe some business cards, an ad layout, and a few other items. Why invest in a piece of the brand that your customers will probably never see? The truth is, they will see it (or the lack of it) in all of those things, and not having a formal brand guidelines system will show a side of your business that you might wish had remained hidden. Brand guidelines are the roadmap for how you use all of the elements of that brand, and when done right, a good set of guidelines elevates the value of everything.
What Are Brand Guidelines?
Brand guidelines are a set of standards, usage rules, examples, and specs for how the various components of a brand visual identity system should be used. These often cover things like color palette, fonts, photography styles, and logo usage. Brand guidelines used to be delivered in the form of a document, often as a PDF, but increasingly they are being built and deployed on web platforms that are designed to host a set of guidelines and make it easier to share them. Web-based brand guidelines also allow for easier updating and rolling out changes that can be made available to an entire team or company instantly.
Why Do You Need Brand Guidelines?
Think of a set of brand guidelines as the glue that holds all of the various pieces of your brand together. In a visual identity system that can sometimes include dozens or even hundreds of individual pieces, documents, forms, presentations, ads, social media posts, videos, etc., brand guidelines serve as the anchor all of those things are connected to. Brand guidelines are the central point that everyone in the organization can refer to when they have a question about how something should look, what fonts or colors they should use, or what stock photo styles they should look for in new advertising imagery.
When Should You Develop Brand Guidelines?
Any time is really a good time to create brand guidelines if your company doesn’t already have them. But is there an opportune time to build this key brand system reference point?
Once you have a logo and some primary brand colors, that is usually a good point at which to formalize the basic brand guidelines and define some of the usage rules for the logo, the different formats and colorways the logo can appear in, and which specific colors make up the company color palette.
Brand Guidelines are especially helpful when they are developed ahead of other marketing and advertising materials. When creating new pieces of a marketing campaign, the creative team will often refer to the brand guidelines throughout the design process. Having a resource available that covers all of the things you can and can’t do when designing for the brand makes the whole process more streamlined and simple. The need to experiment with colors, font sizes, typefaces, and photo styles is removed from the creative process, or at the very least it is narrowed to a more limited set of options. While this might sound restrictive, this doesn’t actually remove any creative decision-making from the process. Many of the creative decisions are already made, the guidelines simply serve as the roadmap for navigating those creative decisions and allowing the team to focus on other key decisions that help make marketing materials better.
How Do Brand Guidelines Elevate the Brand?
Brand guidelines turn random marketing materials into a cohesive marketing system. Rather than having scattered marketing materials and various different versions and formats floating around the company, a set of guidelines keeps everything connected and visually related. Advertising campaigns become more consistent and that makes all of your ads more memorable and impactful. When everyone in the organization has the same business card design, the same email signature style and format, and are empowered to use approved brand elements in their own projects, everything being produced by the company becomes more refined, more professional, and more valuable.
In addition to serving as a company-wide reference point for how the brand should look and how key visual identity elements should be used, brand guidelines also open up opportunities for your team to experience the full scope of the brand system and discover things they have available to them that they might not have been using.
Conclusion
Whether you are just getting started on developing your brand visuals or already have a collection of marketing materials that you need to visually tie together, a good set of brand guidelines can help steer your brand towards improved customer awareness, increased trust, and internal efficiency. Creating this brand roadmap positions your team develop marketing materials faster, keep them more visually and conceptually aligned, and work with a common set of goals for the visual identity of the company.