(photo by Christina Rumpf via Unsplash.com)

What to Include in Brand Guidelines: 5 Essential Rules

Brand Guidelines, Style Guide, Brand Book, Brand Standards Manual, Corporate Identity Guidelines, Visual Standards, and other permutations of these are all names for the same thing—what most of the planet commonly refers to as Brand Guidelines.

Brand Guidelines are essentially a set of rules about how to use Brand Identity and how one should communicate on behalf of the brand.

5 Essential Rules for Brand Guidelines

Every set of Brand Guidelines should include these 5 essential rules (or sections).

1. Introduction to Your Brand Story

Don’t forget to introduce your brand, your brand’s origin story, provide an overview, or present your mission statement. This section is often overlooked, but not every user understands your brand, so it’s essential to tell the user what your brand is all about.

Here’s an example from Destination Canada:
https://brand.destinationcanada.com/en/brand-story

2. The Logo

Use this section to show and talk about your logo, its permutations, and usage, including minimum size, clear space (aka exclusion zone, isolation area), and examples of incorrect usage (what NOT to do).

Spotify - Using Our Logo

3. Colours/Colors

Use this section to specify in detail your brand’s colour/color palette across all the standard colorspaces (i.e., SPOT Pantone, CMYK, RGB, HEX, etc.).

Here’s a great example from X (formerly Twitter). Even though it’s just black and white, the X guidelines make it clear and provide the justification:
“Together, they ensure neutrality, communicate powerfully, and provide consistency across brand communications.”

4. Typography

Use this section to specify which typeface and font to use in print and on websites.

It’s also becoming common practice to specify which font to use in your website’s CSS for specific HTML elements like ‹h1› versus ‹p›.

Here’s an example of the Typography page from Snapchat:

5. Contact Info

You can’t predict every situation. So, who do users contact when they have a situation requiring an exception to the rules (or entirely new rules)? It’s probably the easiest thing to add to your guidelines—but often overlooked.

Here’s an example from the contact page of the Brand Tasmania Brand Book:

Optionally

Many Brand Guidelines include a lot more nice-to-haves. The world is your oyster, and there’s no limit to what you can specify or require of brand users. Bear in mind there is a cost in time and effort to think these things through, address potential scenarios, and write them up. Generally, you should try to keep things as simple as possible. Here are some common inclusions:

• Mission Statement
• Customer Personas
• Image/Photography choice and usage
• Stationery designs (e.g., business cards and letterheads)
• Design layouts and grids
• Iconography
• Copywriting style (tone of voice)
• Signage treatments
• Advertising treatments
• Packaging treatments
• Merchandising treatments
• Dress code/uniforms
• Editorial style

Choose Simplicity Over Complexity

Consistency in executing the brand identity, message, and tone is absolutely key to building brand equity long term.

You’ll want to lay out the rules of deployment with enough detail and structure for users to understand the requirements, while still being flexible enough to be usable in a wide variety of applications.

If the guidelines are too hard to action or too complex to understand, they won’t be used—or they’ll be used with too many compromises.

Check out these Brand Guidelines from Medium for their simplicity, employing a super simple blog post style to communicate the essentials. It’s a great approach.

It’s a Living Thing

The best brands stay true to their origins and remain consistent over a long period.

Brand Guidelines serve as a long-lived guide—sometimes referred to as the “brand bible”—intended to guide users on the long journey.

However, brands are not immune to change, and the journey is never without twists and turns. You should consider how to allow enough flexibility in your rules to enable overarching consistency while responding to market opportunities in a timely manner.

In reality, new mediums, technologies, and societal changes mean a brand and its guidelines must also adapt. You should also think about who can make decisions when exceptions to the rules or entirely new rules are required.

The Future: Going Beyond the Document Model

Brand Guidelines have traditionally been designed by agencies for print, often at great expense, but are more commonly distributed digitally as PDFs today.

Some forward-thinking companies (like Facebook) are breaking the limitations of the document model and building dedicated websites specifically for communicating Brand Guidelines:
https://about.meta.com/brand/resources/facebook/logo/

Others are going a step further and atomizing the traditional Guidelines document into a series of “rules” or “guides,” allowing users to find specific information (e.g., brand colors) by searching a database, brand management system, or DAM.

For example, this atomized Colour/Color Rule from Brandkit:
https://brandkit.com/asset-page/113781-brandkit-purple

This atomized approach reduces costs, adds flexibility, and aids content delivery.

Optimize for Search

Consider how people generally find information—most often through a Google search or emerging alternatives like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

In the past, many brands treated Brand Guidelines as private, locked-away secrets, but this is changing. In today’s competitive landscape, brands must make their guidelines easily findable.

If you’re using a website to communicate your Brand Guidelines, you’re off to a good start, as search engines will index the site automatically. If you’re using a specialized service like Brandkit, your guidelines will also be indexed—provided you allow it.

If you go further and atomize your Brand Guidelines content into small, digestible pieces, SEO improves even more—e.g., a search for “Brandkit Purple” zooms in on the exact data you need.

In Summary

Brands are essential in modern life. Consistent reproduction of a brand’s identity over time is critical to building equity, and Brand Guidelines are one of the most important tools in the brand’s marketing toolbox.

At a minimum, every set of Brand Guidelines should include these 5 essential rules (Brand Story, Logo, Colours/Colors, Typography, and Contact Info), but many include much more.

After the rules are established, consider how you update, communicate, and make your Brand Guidelines findable in the modern era.

Happy branding! 🙂