A sixty-page brand book is a beautiful thing to receive and a difficult thing to use. It arrives as a PDF, it gets saved somewhere, and six months later a staff member making a flyer at short notice opens PowerPoint instead and picks a blue that looks about right.
The point of guidelines is not to document the brand. It is to make the right choice the easy choice for somebody in a hurry who is not a designer. That is a much shorter document.
What has to be in it
The logo, and the three things people get wrong
Not a gallery of variations. The one primary mark, plus whichever alternates genuinely exist: usually a horizontal version, a stacked version, and an icon-only version for a profile picture. Then, explicitly:
- How small it may go before it stops reading. Give a number in millimetres for print and pixels for screen.
- How much clear space must be around it, expressed as a proportion of the mark itself so it scales.
- Which versions to use on which backgrounds: light, dark, and busy photography.
Then a short list of what not to do, with pictures: do not stretch it, do not recolour it, do not add a drop shadow, do not put the full-colour version on a photograph. People need to see the wrong version to recognise it.
Colours, with the codes people actually paste
Every colour needs its HEX for screens, its RGB, its CMYK for print and, if anything is ever printed on merchandise or signage, a Pantone reference. A guideline that gives only a swatch and a name guarantees that somebody eyedroppers it from a JPEG and gets it slightly wrong forever.
Say which colour is primary, which are secondary, and roughly in what proportion they should appear. "These are our colours" without a hierarchy produces documents where the accent is doing all the work.
Type, and what to do when it is not available
Name the fonts, name the weights that are actually used, and say what each is for: headings, body, labels. Two families is usually plenty; three is a system somebody will break.
Then answer the question that always comes up: what do we use in Word, in Google Docs, in an email signature, on a phone, when the licensed font is not installed? A named fallback prevents a document going out in whatever the software defaulted to.
How you sound
Three or four lines is enough, and examples beat adjectives. "Direct, warm, never salesy" tells a person almost nothing. A short before-and-after (the sentence as somebody would naturally write it, and the same sentence in your voice) teaches it in one read.
Add the small mechanical decisions that otherwise get argued about repeatedly: how the company name is written, whether you use an ampersand, whether headings take a full stop, how prices and dates are formatted.
What it looks like applied
This is the part people actually copy from. Show the real things: a social post, a letterhead, an invoice, a business card, a profile picture, a vehicle or a shopfront if that is relevant. Applied examples do more to hold a brand together than any amount of rationale.
What can wait
- The story of how the logo was conceived. Interesting once, referenced never.
- Mood boards and territory exploration. That is presentation material from the project, not a working reference.
- Exhaustive rules for surfaces you do not have. Write the billboard guidance when there is a billboard.
- Anything expressed only in prose. If a rule cannot be shown as a picture or a code, it will not be followed.
The format matters as much as the contents
A PDF is fine as a reference, but on its own it fails the moment somebody needs a file. What actually keeps a brand consistent is a shared folder that anyone who makes anything can reach, containing the logo in every format they will need (vector for print and scaling, PNG with transparency for screens, a square version for profile pictures), plus the fonts, plus editable templates for the two or three things your team makes most often.
If somebody can get the right logo and the right template in under a minute, they will. If they have to ask, they will improvise. Almost every inconsistency traces back to that minute.
How long should it be?
For most small and growing businesses, the useful document is a handful of pages: the logo and its rules, the colours with codes, the type with fallbacks, the voice with examples, and a page of applied work. Everything else is either project archive or a problem you have not got yet.
A short guideline that gets followed is worth more than a thorough one that gets saved.
