Every time you present your brand to customers is an opportunity to reinforce or dilute your brand identity. Brand guidelines, which describe how you want your brand to look and sound in different situations, can help strengthen it.
“It builds trust in your customers if they feel like you have a clear, consistent point of view,” says Ky Allport, creative director of branding agency Outline. According to Ky, the best way to show this point of view is to create a thoughtful and comprehensive brand guide.
Learn what goes into a brand guide and how to create your own, with expert tips from the Outline team. You’ll also get access to a free brand guidelines template and see real-life brand guide examples.
What are brand guidelines?
Brand guidelines are rules a business creates to standardize how they present themselves to the public. They include information on visual aesthetic, brand messaging, and brand voice.
Brand guidelines also dictate acceptable use of your logo, color palettes and fonts, and they clarify the different tones you take in your communications.
According to Ky, brand guidelines—also known as a brand guide, branding package, brand book, brand kit, or brand style guide—usually take the form of a PDF with different sections for the brand’s logos, fonts, colors, illustrations, and photography.
Some organizations also have a separate document known as an editorial guide, which focuses specifically on writing style, grammar usage, and content rules.
“More than identifying what the pieces are, brand guidelines’ job is to show you how to use those things,” Ky says. “Because you can have a set of colors and a set of fonts and do completely different things with them.”
Brand guidelines vs. brand identity
Brand guidelines are a set of rules that help you communicate your brand identity. Your brand identity consists of the choices you make about how you want your brand to look and sound in the world.
Margaret Pilarski, director of brand strategy at Outline, thinks of a brand guide as a roadmap for presenting that identity. That’s why you’ll sometimes see a brand style guide referred to as “brand identity guidelines.”
Why create brand guidelines?
Brand guidelines keep your brand consistent across channels, which helps build brand trust with customers. “You’re creating a recognizable environment so that your shopper is confident and they feel like part of your community,” Margaret says.
Here are several instances when you may need to create brand guidelines:
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You’re designing (or redesigning) your website
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You’re working with external partners, like an agency or freelancers
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New employees are onboarding
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Other people are using your logo or other brand assets
You’re designing (or redesigning) your website
Ky recommends finalizing your brand guidelines before designing your website to make the process smoother.
“A lot of clients reach out to us thinking that they just need a website design, and we’ll actually start evaluating their brand foundations and find out they don’t have a full brand toolkit,” Ky says. “If you don’t have that established to start with, the website can only do so much.”
You’re working with external partners, like an agency or freelancers
You and your employees might be familiar with how to use your brand assets, but people outside your organization might not be. Brand guidelines keep everyone on the same page.
“Any team that’s going to be communicating on behalf of the brand or creating additional assets needs to know what the core [brand] foundation is, both from a visual and verbal perspective,” Ky says.
New employees are onboarding
Brand guidelines introduce new employees to your brand identity and can help ensure cross-team alignment.
“What you’re doing on your website matches what you’re doing on social and how you’re sending your email letter that looks consistent with your product label,” says Ky. “The brand guidelines is one resource that all of those teams share.”
Other people are using your logo or other brand assets
If other entities, like another business you’re collaborating with or an organization you sponsor, use your logo or other brand elements, consider sharing brand guidelines with them to make sure your branding design looks the way you want.
Many larger brands post brand logo usage guidelines publicly, sometimes as part of a press kit. Logo usage guidelines are just one part of a full brand guide.
Elements of a brand guide
Every brand guide is a little different, but a comprehensive guide will go into detail on a handful of core elements.
“It’s really important to put thought into all of the small details that actually add up to a really compelling experience,” Ky says.
Logos
Brand guides devote multiple pages to rules surrounding the acceptable use of logos, including which logo variations to use for different situations.
For each of your brand’s logos, include the logo fonts and rules for resizing, clearspace, and color options.
Typography
Your brand guide will contain a suite of fonts and guidelines for when and how to use each. This component of your visual identity is what’s known as a brand typography.
For example, Heyday Sans, the custom typeface Outline created for Heyday Canning Co., has two widths that can be mixed and matched.
“The idea behind the font was that it would have this variation in width, so it can get a little bit wider, it could get a little more condensed, and then you can stack it in this kind of playful way,” Ky says.
Color palette
A consistent color scheme can immediately orient customers in your brand world. For Heyday Canning Co., Outline chose brand colors that “feel like they could have come from the natural environment, so nothing that feels artificial,” Ky says.
In your brand guide, give each color a name and include its hex code. This is the six-character alphanumeric code used in website color schemes to represent specific colors.
In addition to a color palette, you’ll include guidelines for how to use each of your brand colors, including the color hierarchy, approved color combinations, and which colors should never go together.
Imagery
Photographs, illustrations, and icons are all part of your brand’s visual language. Your brand guide is a place to explain the photographic and graphic design styles you use on your website, digital marketing materials, or physical product packaging designs with examples.
Photographers and illustrators draw inspiration and guidance from the examples in your brand guide to create new images consistent with your aesthetic.
Audience
Your target audience informs what type of content you create and how you present it. As part of your brand development, you may segment your customer base into specific brand personas, based on demographics, buying behavior, and attributes.
“We always encourage our clients to really know who they’re talking to,” Ky says. “Be clear about that, because you’re going to have a lot more success from your true brand champions than if you’re trying to be everything for everyone.”
Outline sometimes provides their clients with two brand guides: one focused on visual style with the items outlined above, and another covering brand positioning, including audience, ecommerce customer segmentation, and the elements listed below. Other times, they combine the visual and written elements into a single guide.
Voice and tone
The voice and tone definitions you outline in your brand guide inform your copywriting. This applies to text on your website, product packaging, social media profiles, blog posts, and more.
The rules of brand voice and tone go hand in hand, but there’s one key difference.
“Your voice is constant. Your brand should always sound like your brand, regardless of the channel or situation,” Margaret says.
“Tone, on the other hand, is how your voice adapts to different situations. For example, the tone you use with a customer who’s just made a sale is different from how you’d speak to a frustrated customer.”
Grammar and style conventions
Grammar and style conventions are the details of how you communicate your brand’s voice. For example, if your brand’s voice is serious and authoritative, you might stay away from informal grammar conventions and slang. If your brand’s point of view is youthful, slang might not be a bad thing.
Share your brand’s grammar and style conventions with writers, editors, and copy editors and note your preferred style manual (usually AP or Chicago). Details like whether you use the Oxford comma or how you capitalize words in headlines might seem small, but your copy will look sloppy if it’s inconsistent.
How to create a brand guide
- Decide how to resource the project
- Hone in on your brand personality
- Create a mood board
- Create key brand assets
- Set usage guidelines
Your brand should be unique, but the process of creating brand guidelines is often the same.
“For a lot of people, it’s getting all of their thoughts and ideas out, pointing at other brands they think are doing something good or bad, and using those data points to figure out what this brand’s stakes in the ground are, and then putting some rules around that and organizing it,” Margaret says.
Here’s how to create your own brand guide:
1. Decide how to resource the project
Creating brand guidelines requires expertise in design and copywriting; if these aren’t your forté, consider finding resources to help.
If you have an internal design and/or copy lead on your team, enlist them onto the project. If not, or if your internal team doesn’t have the expertise or time to do the work themselves, you can hire a freelancer or an agency to build your brand identity and create brand guidelines.
If you decide to create your own brand guidelines, following a brand style guide template ensures you include all the necessary elements. Shopify’s free brand guidelines template includes editable fields for your brand colors, logos, and fonts.
2. Hone in on your brand personality
Your brand personality informs the decisions you make about your brand’s style.
“The one thing that we’re always looking for is, ‘Does the brand have a distinct point of view?’” Ky says. “And then that point of view gets translated into both visual and verbal assets.”
For example, Heyday Canning Co. Cofounder and CEO Kathryn Kavner Woolf had a clear vision for her brand before she started working on the company’s aesthetic.
“We want Heyday to feel like your friend that happens to be really good at cooking, that loves to invite you over for dinner, and is kind of cooking alongside you in the kitchen,” Kathryn says on Shopify Masters.
This personality informs Heyday’s written copy as well as the visual elements that define the brand.
For Kathryn, taking the time to develop a distinct vision for Heyday improved the process of working with a branding partner.
“We had this foundation of knowing who we are and what we stood for and what we wanted to convey,” says Kathryn, explaining that Heyday was able to take that knowledge to Outline and brief them on logo, color, and font ideas.
“That up-front work really helped them understand what we were trying to do and what we wanted to create.”
This is a good time to refer to any past market research you’ve conducted for product-market fit or a competitive analysis to determine your unique value proposition (UVP). Before you get attached to a color scheme or tagline, you’ll need to know it won’t be easily confused with an established competitor.
As you get further into the process and narrowing options, it’s also helpful to understand the meaning of trademark versus copyright, and what it takes to trademark your brand.
3. Create a mood board
Whether you work with an agency or an in-house creative team, or create brand guidelines yourself using a brand guidelines template, a mood board can be a helpful starting point for deciding how you want your brand to look and sound.
“Usually how a branding process starts is you get to know the brand, the founder, maybe there’s a mood board to help inform the direction, and then we’ll put together a concept, which would include like logos, color, visuals and typography—all the key assets—to give you an idea of how the brand could express itself like in the world,” Ky says.
To get started with your mood board, compile images that align with how you want your brand to look and create a document where you brainstorm ideas of how you want your brand to sound. You can include thoughts about your audience and brand voice, potential taglines and slogans, value propositions, and words to avoid.
4. Create key brand assets
Once you’ve refined your vision and brand personality, it’s time to create the visual and written brand assets you’ll use again and again. Some brand assets are essential (like logo and color palette) while others, like iconography and photography, might not be immediately necessary for your company. You can always add these nice-to-have assets down the line.
Here are a few tips as you start developing your must-have visual brand assets:
Logos
Consider creating both wordmark and icon (or “picturemark”) logos. Even if you use a wordmark as your primary logo, you’ll likely use an icon logo in other places, like at the top of your website tab in your favicon.
Color palette
One option is to start with a primary, secondary, and tertiary color, and add additional colors later on for a more comprehensive palette. Record the Pantone, Hex, CMYK, and/or RGB codes for each color you choose.
Typography
Choose a brand font (a recognizable font that speaks to your brand personality) and a supporting font (an easy-to-read font you’ll use in CTAs and longform copy). Decide on font and size for headers and body copy, establish spacing standards, and design your typefaces (how your fonts look in bold and italics), and include visual examples for each use case.
Here are the nice-to-have visual brand assets to consider:
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Photography: This encompasses an approved photo library with images your brand can use across its website and marketing channels.
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Illustrations: If you’ve partnered with a designer or illustrator, compile their work to use it in newsletters, social media posts, and more (as long as you have the illustrator’s permission).
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Iconography: Use symbols and icons to quickly communicate meaning or add visual interest to your website branding. Iconography assets comprise approved symbols.
Keep these elements in mind as you draft written brand assets:
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Boilerplate copy: You’ll use this piece of copy in corporate communications, and external organizations will use it when they’re describing your business. It should succinctly summarize what your company does.
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Slogans, taglines, and ad copy: Write down approved slogans, taglines, ad copy, and email copy that you’ll use repeatedly.
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Brand voice and tone: You can start by distilling your brand voice into three adjectives, then explaining how to express each in written communication. For example, if one of your brand voice characteristics is “familiar,” you might say that you should express this with informal greetings and slang.
If you use Shopify, you can add brand assets like your logo, brand colors, and slogan to your Shopify admin for easy access.
Compatible Shopify themes automatically pull your brand assets into your theme settings. Shopify also provides free business tools, such as a logo designer and a domain name generator.
5. Set usage guidelines
Effective brand guidelines are user-friendly and clearly explain how to use all of the assets you’ve created. They set the ground rules for how you describe and visually represent your company.
Depending on your brand’s assets, you may need to establish the following:
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Logo rules: Explain when and where to use your icon versus the wordmark logos, and how to use them together. Include resolution requirements and directions on “safety areas”—the blank space around your logo that will help you avoid competing visuals.
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Color palette rules: Note when to use each individual color and make a list of approved color combinations. For example, are business lines or product categories color-coded?
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Typography rules: Add directions on when to use your brand and supporting fonts. Include minimum and maximum font sizes and rules on leading (the space between lines) and tracking (the space between letters).
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Brand voice and tone rules: You might note how your brand speaks internally, externally (like in a press release), and in a sales setting (like in a CTA button). Add an adjective for each, and include do’s and don’ts for each use case.
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Grammar rules: Decide whether to rely on AP or Chicago style. You might also create a list of banned words and phrases and list replacements for them.
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Photography use and style: Photography use guidelines dictate when and how to use photos. Photography style guidelines include rules on how to capture and edit photographs in the future, with notes on saturation, color scheme, lighting, camera angle, and more.
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Illustration use and style: Set rules on when and where to feature illustrations, set guidelines for future illustrators, and include examples of approved illustrations.
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Iconography use and style: Explain when and where to use icons, and include style guidelines explaining how to create them in the future.
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Visual hierarchy: Illustrate the order of importance when placing elements and key information. Elements may include perspective, typography, contrast, color, size, and layout.
If your brand book is long, you might create a directory to make it easy for readers to navigate. Include links to folders with your brand assets and contact details for follow-up questions.
Brand guide examples
NASA
In 1976, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) released a new logo along with a 60-page manual detailing how to use it.
These brand guidelines also include NASA’s brand fonts (Helvetica, Futura, Garamond, and Times Roman) and the intention behind each. For example, “The precision letterforms [of Futura] have a technological character and make it a natural for certain NASA projects.”
Your brand guide might not be as long as NASA’s and probably won’t include specifications for using your logo on spacecraft, but the administration’s rules are still a classic brand guide example. “NASA is kind of idolized,” Ky says.
Heyday Canning Co.
The 23-page brand guide Outline created for Heyday includes rules about how to use the Heyday wordmark and emblem, plus examples of which fonts to use for headlines and quotes. There’s also a page with examples of unapproved uses and an explanation of what’s wrong with each example.
Droosh
For the Indian spice blend and sauce company Droosh, Outline created a 44-page brand guide that details the business’s logo system, typography, color palette, visual elements, applications, and photography.
In the logo system section, Outline describes the technical aspects of Droosh’s logo as well as the intention behind its design. They note that the R and S are positioned at 22 degree angles (the number 22 signifies harmony) and that the interlocking O’s represent the founding family’s bond.
“A good brand guideline gives you the intention of the design. It explains visual language,” says Ky. “There should be an underlying system that someone reading the brand guidelines could then take and utilize to create various other things on behalf of the brand.”
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Brand guidelines FAQ
What is in a brand guide?
A brand guide includes rules for how a brand presents itself both visually and in writing. It has information on how to use logos, typefaces, colors, and graphics, as well as preferred language. A brand guideline template can help ensure you include all the necessary elements.
Are brand guidelines the same as a style guide?
The terms “brand guidelines” and “style guide” are sometimes used interchangeably, but “style guide” can also refer to a document of guidelines for written content only, while brand guidelines typically include rules for both visual and written elements.
Do you need a brand guide?
Brand guides help you develop a cohesive visual identity and ensure brand consistency. You might need a brand guide if you are creating a website or physical product, working with an agency or freelancers, or hiring new employees.
How long should a brand guide be?
A full-length brand guide can be anywhere from 15 to 80 pages, according to Ky Allport, creative director of branding agency Outline. A preliminary brand guide could consist of “just a few pages that have their logo, their colors, their fonts, but not necessarily a lot of guidelines on how to use all of those things,” Ky says.
