What Are Brand Guidelines?
A Comprehensive Guide to Brand Guidelines: What are brand guidelines?
Brand guidelines are a set of directives and principles that help define and shape a company or organization's brand identity.
These guidelines encompass several aspects such as the tone of voice used in marketing communications, brand colors, logos, fonts, and other visual elements.
Having clear brand guidelines in place is crucial for companies as it ensures that their brand is consistently portrayed across all marketing channels.
This consistency, in turn, helps to establish brand awareness and loyalty among customers.
Therefore, whether you are a new startup or an established business aiming to revamp your brand image, having brand guidelines is an essential component of building and sustaining a robust brand presence in the marketplace.
In this blog post, we will provide an all-encompassing guide on brand guidelines and answer the fundamental question of what they are.
Additionally, we will present and share visual and non-visual brand guidelines.
We have two primary sets of brand guidelines, our Brand Identity Guidelines that focus more on visual elements, and our Brand Communication Strategy and Guidelines that emphasize non-visual components of the brand.
If you require comprehensive assistance on your brand guidelines and don't know where to start, you can book a consulting call with us.
Keep reading to learn more about brand guidelines, style guides and brand bibles.
Who needs brand guidelines?
They can be used by everyone in your team, from writers, designers, marketers and anyone else who need the visuals and information from your brand guidelines to create branded materials or understand your brand identity/brand story.
Whether you're just starting out with a brand new brand or looking to reinvigorate an existing brand, brand guidelines are an essential part of building and maintaining a strong brand presence in the marketplace.
By outlining your brand's key messaging, visual identity, and brand voice, brand guidelines can help ensure that your company is conveying the right brand message and building brand awareness and loyalty with your customers.
The brand guidelines can come in a digital format or a physical copy describing how your brand functions with the use of different elements and creative branded assets to form a cohesive brand identity.
Visual Brand Identity Guidelines, may also be referred to as a brand guide, brand guidelines, brand style guide, brand bible, brand book, branding book, branding guide and branding guidelines.
These can all be treated in the same way or as distinct resources–depending on your company needs and what brand expert you’re listening to.
What is the purpose of brand guidelines?
To ensure brand consistency and clarity across all of your brand's marketing and communications efforts.
This includes materials such as online content, social media posts, email newsletters, advertisements, and more. With clear brand guidelines in place, you can be confident that all brand messaging is communicated correctly and consistently to your target audience.
This blog has been written by The Branded Agency, we are a diverse group of creative branding experts and we’re ready to help you with all of your branding needs.
Whether you're a startup that's just getting started and needs everything from brand positioning, brand strategy, brand messaging and a visual brand identity, or a fortune 100 company that's looking for brand extension, product branding or rebrand, we're here to help.
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Table of contents
Branding Guidelines vs. Brand Communication Strategy Guidelines
What’s included in both brand guidelines?
What is the purpose of a brand guideline?
How Do I Get Brand Guidelines?
What are brand guidelines - Brand Clarity & Brand Consistency
What are brand guidelines - More Examples
The Branded will be sharing our tips on brand guidelines, examples we created for our clients, and we'll highlight the purpose of different brand guidelines.
So, if you are enjoying this article thus far keep reading!
Visual Brand Identity Guidelines vs.
Brand Communication Guidelines
The Branded Agency offers two different types of brand guidelines, one is visual and the other is non-visual.
Visual Brand Identity Guidelines focus on the brand's visual elements, such as the brand's logo, color scheme, and typefaces. These brand guidelines help to ensure that all of the brand's marketing and advertising materials are consistent with each other and reflect the brand's core identity.
Non-visual Brand Communication Strategy & Guidelines focus on brand messaging, positioning and voice. This brand guideline helps to ensure that the brand's key messaging is communicated consistently across all of the brand's marketing and communications efforts, whether it's in a blog post, an email newsletter, or on social media.
If you're looking to create brand guidelines for your brand, we recommend working with a branding agency that has experience in creating both visual brand identity guidelines and non-visual brand communication strategy and guidelines.
You’re welcome to book a discovery call with us–we can help guide you towards the correct strategy and solution for your business.
Let’s take a look at branding guidelines for our client: RealPekka an outdoor clothing startup from Poland.
Brand Identity and Guidelines
Brand Communication Guidelines
Let’s take a look at brand communication strategy and guidelines for our client: Upstart Epoxy.
This Brand Communication Strategy and guidelines we created for them identifies their brand mission, vision, communication objectives and principles, their brand messaging and brand voice and tone.
The brand communication guidelines also includes copywriting guidelines and a brand voice chart
What’s Included In Brand Guidelines?
What's included in branding guidelines?
As previously mentioned, there are two different types of brand guidelines, one is visual and the other are non-visual guidelines. Each set of documents have different formats and included a unique set of guidelines.
It's also important to know that you shouldn't create any brand guidelines until your brand positioning, brand strategy and brand identity system has been created. The reason for this is your guidelines will elements from these documents and provide a set of rules to follow.
Visual Brand Guidelines
This is where we take your brand identity system and create a set of rules and guidelines to follow, before you get to this stage you will need to have a logo, color palette, typography, iconography, patterns, shapes and other visual elements created.
The guidelines will usually include logo usage guidelines, color guidelines, typography guidelines, iconography guidelines, photography guidelines, packaging guidelines, website guidelines, social media guidelines, rendering guidelines, shape and pattern guidelines and sometimes much more.
Brand Communication Guidelines
The brand communication strategy and guidelines expands on your brand positioning.
We will identify your communication objectives and principles and align our brand messaging and guidelines to support these goals.
Brand Communication Guidelines are less common, most people tend to focus on the visual aspect of their brand, however, by clearly articulating your key messages to your target audience, you'll find that there will be an increase in engagement, brand recall and brand sentiment.
Let's take a step back and revisit the three thing's mentioned earlier in the post that you must have before you create your brand guidelines.
Brand Positioning
To position your brand properly, you should always start with research and analysis.
To effectively formulate your brand positioning you need to become an expert in the niche you're looking to penetrate.
Your research should include identifying your direct and indirect competitors and creating a SWOT analysis and positioning maps to better understand these competitors positioning in the market place.
Your research should look at industry trends, consumer drivers, psychological drivers and motivators and much more.
All of this research will help you identify the problem that exists for the consumer and the solution you will provide them with.
You'll then be able to simply your business using the golden circle, what do you do?, how do you do it? and Why do you do it?
From there, you you create your brand purpose and purpose statement, brand pillars, brand vision, brand personality, brand tagline and key messages.
Brand Identity System
The first thing you should do when you are looking to create your visual brand identity is brand concepts.
Brand concepts explore potential visual identities for your brand, they will include example logo styles, sample color palettes, typography, iconography, photography, these brand concepts will be illustrated through moodboards and be accompanied by clear explanations of the creative and visual direction of the brand.
Once a brand concept has been selected, the creative direction of the brand becomes clear and you can now create the custom visual elements needed to create your brand identity system.
Typically, you'd start by designing the brands logo, followed by shapes and patterns. You'd finalize your selection of typography and your color palette and you may decide to create custom iconography and other design elements, depending on the brand concept chosen.
When all of the visual branding elements have been created, you'll be ready to create your visual branding guidelines.
Brand colours
The colors used in the brand guidelines should be predetermined by the finalized brand concept or the finalized color palette in your brand identity system.
The brand colors need to align with the essence of the brand and should resonate with. your target audience.
Your Brand guidelines should include color codes in RGB, CMYK and HEX at the very least. You also have the option to include Pantone colors if you have access to it.
Here is why branding colours matter.
Study after study proves that more than half (62-90%) of customers' assessment of products is based on the colours alone.
Getting your brand's palette right is important, and making it clear in detail in your brand guideline will be helpful.
We can think about it like this:
Color psychology is the study of how colours affect perceptions and behaviours. It allows us to understand colour and use it to our advantage, especially when it comes to marketing and branding.
Every set of brand guidelines should include that to have the basic foundation of a brand guideline book. Other elements that can be considered are:
Brand Fonts and Typography
Your brand guidelines should include primary and secondary typography and web safe fallback font.
Your typography guidelines should clearly show and explain how and when to use the different typography for website body copy, headings and buttons.
These typography guidelines are helpful for website designers, graphic designers and anyone working or publishing on your brands blog.
Brand Voice and Brand Tone
Typically, your brand voice and brand tone would be created in a brand communication strategy and guidelines document, however, some agencies do offer a master brand book that may include some of these non-visual elements in visual brand guidelines.
For more details on creating a brand voice and brand tone and brand communication guidelines visit out other blog post here brand voice guideline and this blog post what is a brand voice
Brand Shapes and Brand Patterns
Brand shapes are a useful design elements that can be used on branding and marketing collateral, your brand shapes could be a standard circle, square, rectangle, triangle, or, your brand shapes could be a more unique customized shape.
Your brand shapes may or may not be repurposed and used to create a pattern, but, it's an option that may make everything more closely aligned and cohesive.
Brand patterns maybe used for packaging, background images, social media and other areas.
Your brand shapes and patterns used in your brand guidelines should include usage applications of what you should and shouldn't do.
Photography guidelines
If your business is required to do photoshoots on a regular basis, you may want to include camera setup guidelines, lighting guidelines, studio setup guidelines in addition to your typical people and product photography guidelines.
At a basic level photography guidelines usually includes example people and product photography example imagery ad do's and don'ts.
Outline any photography usage that needs to be approved by a brand representative first and include any licensing or sharing agreements for third-party images.
Overall, it's important to create brand guidelines that clearly outline and explain all of your brand elements in detail.
Iconography Guidelines
To effectively use iconography in your marketing campaigns, it's essential to have clear iconography guidelines They help to create a consistent brand identity that resonates with your target audience, using carefully selected design elements such as color, fonts, and iconography.
To fully utilize the power of iconography in your marketing campaigns, it's important to have clear guidelines for how to use these visual elements.
Typically, iconography guidelines will include usage guidelines, style guidelines and dos and don'ts.
Brand Applications
Brand applications is where you showcase the branding elements and show real life examples of how it can be applied to across various platforms and elements.
Typically, you will apply the logo, colors, typography, shapes and patterns to business cards, envelopes, t-shirts, coffee mugs, vehicle wraps and other promotional items.
This is perhaps one of the most important parts of the brand guidelines document, you are taking the set of rules and guidelines you created and showing how they can be applied in real life scenarios.
Sometimes, depending on the brand and budget you may be able to get more creative and find more innovative ways to apply the brand guidelines to real life products.
What Is The Purpose Of Branding Guidelines?
By following a set of rules and principles, your internal team will achieve brand consistency for external communication with your audience.
It is also a tool that will set the standard and tone for your business and will lessen any confusion internally, which results in less confusion externally!
Branding Guidelines help your team and other stakeholders understand the essence of the brand and feel confident that they are promoting or representing the brand story and brand image in a professional and cohesive way.
Your brand guidelines are a great onboarding tool for new employees, its important they understand the brand positioning and are aligned with the mission and vision.
How do you create brand guidelines?
A senior graphic designer, or, creative director are responsible for creating your companies brand guidelines.
They should have the knowledge and experience to do this, however, if you don't have these key positions within your organization you may want to consider hiring a branding agency to assist you with your brand identity and brand guidelines.
Our agency, The Branded Agency have created more than 100+ brand guidelines for all different types of businesses.
We've worked with small startups and fortune 100 companies across a wide variety of industries.
Visual brand guidelines take 2-3 weeks to create and the cost for this starts at $4,500 USD.
If you'd like to book a call to review your brand identity system and discuss your project, please contact us directly for a free custom quote.
The second option is through hiring a freelancer from websites like Upwork, Dribbble, Behance and Fiverr.
However, keep in mind that when working with a freelancer from one of these platforms, it’s likely they won’t have the knowledge of experience to execute at a high level.
Examples of brand guidelines
Here are 2 different examples of visual brand guidelines for you to review.
Keoch
The image above is an example of the brand identity and guidelines we created for Keoch.
The brand identity and guidelines we created for them include colour palette, colour guidelines, colour applications, colour gradients, colour tones, typography, typography pairings, typography usage, typography applications, illustration guidelines, iconography guidelines, social media guidelines and more.
These Brand Identity and Guidelines will help them be consistent with their visual communication across all channels.
Pianu Brand Guidelines
The Image above is an example of the brand identity and guidelines we created for Pianu.
Pianu hired us to reposition their brand, create a new marketing and brand strategy and a complete rebrand , which included research and analysis, marketing strategy, product strategy, brand positioning, brand identity system, brand communication strategy and a redesign of their website and mobile app.
The Branded can create high-quality Brand Identity Guidelines and a brand communication strategy for your business that will align your team and help you connect with. your target audience.
Well, you’ve come this far!
It’s time to get in touch with us to discuss your branding and marketing needs.
You’re in good hands with The Branded we are a full service branding and creative agency designed to help the next generation of businesses.
Drop us a line and say hello!
If you need help creating and developing your brand pillars, checkout our blog post here https://www.brandedagency.com/blog/brand-pillars-guide
Here are some very specific step by step branding guides for: Real Estate, Lawyers, Accounting, Doctors, Dentists, Optometrists, Jewellery, Makeup & Beauty, Skincare, Pet Food, Fashion and Construction.
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