As my children have gotten older and started to play organized sports, one of the first things you teach them — regardless of the sport — are the rules. Before they can begin to understand and grow in any sport, they need to learn the guidelines and expectations. In understanding what’s allowed, they need to learn what’s not allowed. 

Most people (…dads…) wouldn’t try to start building something without clearly understanding the directions first — why would you try to build and scale a brand without brand guidelines? 

One of the backbones of a trustworthy and recognizable brand is consistency and authenticity. Across all internal and external touchpoints, consistency is important in how you look, act, speak and represent the brand — brand guidelines help maintain that consistency.

Great brands don’t have to slap their logo or name all over everything. The colors, typography, photography, voice, and use of negative space are just some examples of brand elements that, when delivered consistently, help to identify some of the world’s most well-known brands.

On NPR’s How I Built This podcast, I heard Whitney Wolfe, founder of Bumble say,

“I really believe anybody can copy a product…with the right support, somebody could rebuild any piece of technology, it’s engineering. However, you cannot just copy someone’s brand and become them. There has to be authenticity when you build a brand, and there has to be true purpose.”

A company’s products and services can always be copied, but the brand is unique and brand guidelines help protect that brand as you grow. 

No two company’s brand guidelines will be the same — they can be relatively brief or extremely lengthy and detailed. Depending on the brand’s needs and size, guidelines may have a variety of different elements included within the guidelines. However, regardless of the need or the size of the company, all brand guidelines will typically include these components:

• Logo

• Colors

• Typography

• Photography & Iconography

• Voice

• Usage Examples

LOGO

A logo is one of the most recognizable components of a brand and generally has prominent placement on a variety of channels. Representing the brand’s logo differently on different mediums can create confusion and brand dilution.

In the logo section of the brand guidelines, it’ll typically address allowable color variations of the logo as well as clear space that is needed around the logo. It’s equally important to say and show what not to do. For example, don’t adjust the scale of the elements within the logo, don’t add any effects to the logo like beveling and embossing, don’t change the colors of the logo, etc.

COLOR PALETTE

The color palette is an integral part of brand identity. Consistent use of the color palette both reinforces brand cohesiveness and also communicates a specific feeling and emotion to the audience. Engaging brand experts ensures appropriate color theory is taken into account when developing the color palette.

A general rule of thumb is to have between 3-5 distinct colors in the primary color palette. Shades and tints are created from the primary palette to provide even more variability while still maintaining consistent brand expression. A secondary or tertiary color palette provides even more options, like differentiating product lines or different services offered.

TYPOGRAPHY

Many times, font and typography are used interchangeably, and while they’re related, they’re different. A typeface is a set of one or more fonts that share common design features. Each font of a typeface has a specific weight, style, condensation, width, slant, italicization, etc.

Typography is a powerful brand tool that should never detract from the message, but instead allow the reader to focus on the content — not how the content looks. It should go unnoticed and should feel comfortable to the reader. Typography in brand guidelines should establish a hierarchy within the content, utilizing different weights, sizes and colors to convey what content is of most importance to the reader. Finally, it should create harmony within the document and cohesion throughout your brand, helping to build brand recognition beyond the logo and color palette.

PHOTOGRAPHY & ICONOGRAPHY

As your brand grows, chances are you don’t have full time designers and photographers on staff. For this reason and others, it’s important to clearly define in the brand guidelines your expectations with respect to these elements. Doing so ensures that partners and agencies can effectively and creatively create content for you that is consistent with the brand.

Visual elements like photography and iconography are strategic tools in your brand guidelines. Similar to typography, visual brand assets should always reinforce the message and each element should evoke and reinforce the brand’s mission, vision, values and purpose.

VOICE

Beyond just the press release boilerplate and your mission, vision and values — which are all important and should definitely be included — your brand guidelines need to describe how you want your brand to sound. Think about what types of adjectives you’d use to describe the brand — are you friendly or formal, authoritative or passive?

In this section of the guidelines, you can clearly define how products and services are worded or phrased, what competitors can and cannot be mentioned, restricted words or phrases, and what topics the brand can and should write about.

In my opinion, voice is one of the hardest branding elements to nail down in your brand guidelines, but it’s crucial as that voice will be used in website copy, press releases, social media posts, blog posts, marketing collateral, video scripts, and all internal and external communications.

USAGE EXAMPLES

The final piece of your brand guidelines should include a sampling of examples of everything we’ve discussed. In this section, demonstrate what acceptable and unacceptable logo placement looks like and be able to demonstrate what an acceptable brand photo is and isn’t. Provide examples of website and marketing copy to establish how the typography should appear.

The text in your brand guidelines will undoubtedly answer many initial questions, but clearly seeing the expectations through various examples would hopefully leave little doubt and clear up any ambiguity. When you partner with various creatives like graphic designers or photographers, seeing visual examples of your brand expectations is invaluable and can prevent multiple tiresome rounds of revisions lessening the amount of unnecessary work that needs to be done.

YOU NEED BRAND GUIDELINES

Brand guidelines are essential for companies of any size and have many different uses, everything from creating and designing brand assets like packaging, social media posts, website and marketing collateral, to share with agencies and franchisees to maintain consistency with the brand as you grow, and also internally with employees — especially when you consider the impact of employee advocacy programs.

Whether you’re a company of 1 or 100,000, you need brand guidelines.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Skaggs is the co-founder of BODDHI Branding, a creative agency with a vision to authentically and creatively construct stories to help your brand grow. Digital and social media, branding, recruitment and content strategy are all functions Chris has developed building teams, processes and strategies from the ground-up. Dedicated to giving back Chris also co-founded Leighton’s Gift, a non-profit with a mission of turning a tragedy into something positive. He also serves on the boards of a variety of different organizations. A natural storyteller, Chris’ work and experiences have been featured on CNN, Marketing Sherpa, Thrive Global, CBS Radio, Recruiter.com and Glassdoor. Get connected online, @chrislskaggs.