Brandkit Platform Tour: Brand Guidelines
Keep everyone on brand with
your Brand Guidelines in the cloud
A single source - and always up to date
Keep everyone on brand with searchable, accessible, editable, downloadable, Brand Guidelines that are tightly integrated with downloadable Brand Assets —and optimised for AI. Ensuring worry free brand compliance, so you can share your brand assets with confidence.
4 Flavours of Brand Guidelines
...choose your preference or do all four
(1) Atomised digital, (2) Traditional PDF, (3) Single Web page, or (4) stand alone website.
Brandkit supports all four.
(1) Atomised digtal Brand Guidelines (Recommended approach)
Digital brand guidelines that are living, editable, machine-readable brand guidelines that live alongside your brand assets so users and AI stay compliant — without switching tools or interupting their flow.
This is a new approach that is both modern, easy to implement, easy to maintain, the most searchable and the most AI optimal.
Break up your guidelines into a series of individual guidelines, that can be searched, mixed and matched, surfaced, shared and downloaded as needed along with Brand Assets. An added benefit is AI prefers your Brand guidlines chunked up into smaller pieces too.
Plus you can the assemble individual Guidelines into a single web page, with a psuedo document structure if you prefer, using a Guidelines Smart-section in the Brandkit CMS. A structured way to create a single page digital brand guidelines or style guide.
Lastly, atomised Guidelines are automatically prepared for for AI ingestion, with an automatically generated https://yourdomain.com/guidelines.md knowledge source endpoint —which is updateable in real-time, crawlable, linkable, and consumable by AI.
How it works
(A) Create individual Guidelines
Convert your printed or PDF Brand guidelines into a series of digital guidelines, using the dedicated Guidelines Asset type and editing tools. Create individual Guidelines for each section in your Brand Guidelines, e.g Colour Swatch, Isolation Area, Typography, Tone of Voice, etc. Use the built in mardown or WYSIWYG editor, and insert images directly from the DAM in your guideline. Then Attach specific guidelines to appropriate Assets. This adds maximum flexibility as you can add additional guidelines, or edit individual guidelines independently from other guidelines. Allowing maximum velocity and flexibility when adjusting your brand guidelines.
(B) Attach to Brand Assets
The next step is to attach your Guidelines Assets to your Brand Assets (e.g. your Logos) using Brandkit's Attachment feature.
(C) Automagically attached to downloads
Once attached the Brand Guidelines will be automatically included in any downloads or shares of those Assets, as guideline-name.md files.
(D) Optionally create Brand Guidelines Portal page
Optionally you can create a custom Portal page using the CMS (Pro and Enterprise editions) and add a Smart Guidelines Section with multiple layout options, that auto-populates with your atomised Guidelines Assets. Learn more.
(2) Traditional Brand Guidelines PDF - with auto-magic attachment
The traditional document based Brand Guidelines PDF typically created in Adobe Indesign (but could be created in any other document creation software) is uploaded as an Asset and can be embedded in web pages, found in search, viewed, downloaded shared, and even automatically attached to downloads of specific brand assets.
How it works
(A) Upload your Brand Guidelines
Upload your Brand Guidelines document (typically a multipage PDF) as an Asset. This makes it a searchable, downloadable and shareable Asset in your Brandkit.
(B) Attach to Brand Assets
The next step is to attach your Brand Guidelines Asset(s) to your Brand Assets (e.g. your Logos) using Brandkit's Attachment feature.
(C) Automagically attached to downloads
Once attached the Brand Guidelines will be automatically included in any downloads or shares of those Assets.
(3) Single Web Page
Create editable Digital Brand Guidelines - as a single web page using the CMS built in into Brandkit. Utilize our our pre-built code snippets for advanced layouts in each section, or use AI to help you code custom layouts and designs.
The result is that your digital Brand Guidelines are tightly integrated with downloadable brand assets and the Brandkit platform. So you get maximum flexibility, plus the full power of an industrial strength DAM. You can embed search grids and assets directly from the DAM in the pages and/or sections of your Brand Guidelines.
Other benefits over a document based PDF include; the ability to edit easily and you no longer need to republish and redistribute an updated document for every little change. It just happens automatically.
Example of editable Digital Brand Guidelines from https://demo.brandkitapp.com
How it works
(A) Create a custom page in the CMS
Create a custom page (e.g brand-guidelines) in the built-in CMS. Then create sections for each section of your Brand Guidelines and populate with content. You can write HTML, embed images from the DAM directly, and use custom CSS to lay thing out just how you like it. Alternatively ask the Brandkit team to create this for you.
(B) Wire up the page to site Navigation
Add nav items to link to your Brand Guidelines page in the site header or footer, or invent your own navigation. The Brandkit team can also do this for you.
(C) Publish
Once you're happy with the Brand Guidelines page and nav, make th page and nav live and let users at it.
Here's another example of Digital Brand Guidelines - in this case our own Brandkit Brand Guidelines in digital form.
(4) Brand Guidelines as a stand alone site
Brand Guidelines as the main thing. A whole website dedicated to your brand style guide and downloadable brand assets like logo artwork, icons, graphics, and design templates. There's nothing like focus - and Brand Guidelines as the entire website is most definitely focussed on one thing - your brand identity and how to use and deploy it..
You can supply your current brand guidelines and let us design and build it for you, or if you prefer and have the expertise on staff, you can build and deploy it yourselves using the Brandkit DAM and CMS in tandem.
Book a Demo or contact Sales
Moving on from the Monolithic Document
Traditionally Brand Guidelines are a monolithic document with multiple pages.
They are often created by your Design Agency in Adobe’s InDesign at great expense. A change or tweak requires editing the document and reissuing the entire thing.
Designers love them (for the work they bring), while end users often resist consulting them.
That is so last century.
In the digital era, there is an opportunity to improve the user experience, and save money.
The answer - is to either create Digital Brand Guidelines or to atomise your Brand Guidelines into smaller searchable components or "rules" - aka Atomised Brand Rules.
Brandkit® is taking up the challenge.
We’ve introduced a powerful CMS you can use to build editable Digital Brand Guidelines using standard web technologies (HMTL, CSS, and Javascript) and pre-built sections, plus Brandkit's redesigned Attachments feature to support Atomised Brand Rules and auto-attachment to downloads.
Now you can now choose your preferred approach. Either a traditional monolithic document (usually a PDF), Digital Brand Guidelines, or searchable Atomised Brand Rules. All three options are now supported.
