Have you ever identified a brand with just one glance without actually reading its name? We bet you have done it on multiple occasions, and that’s what a strong brand identity is all about!
But creating a strong and successful brand identity isn’t an overnight process. The final product that you see is a result of a lot of research, thought, revision, industry experience, insights, and more. It’s not just a few random colours slapped on a logo design. There’s a comprehensive strategy behind building an identity that truly reflects your brand and is compatible and adaptive to your business growth.
Thus, having brand guidelines in place helps you set in the right direction with your branding. Every brand wants to create a long-lasting impact on its target audience and a brand guide enables you to achieve that.
Let’s talk more about brand guidelines, their importance, and how they help your own branding.
What are brand guidelines?
Brand guidelines simply document the rules and standards that define how your brand should represent itself across all communication. This helps businesses, designers, writers and everyone else involved in creating marketing materials using brand elements. Brand guidelines can be presented in a book, PDF, or PPT format, and includes your brand’s personality, the look and feel, etc. Basically, it’s a rulebook on how brand elements must be used, their significance, and how each aspect comes together to create the brand identity.
What do brand guidelines include?
If you want to create a brand guide for your organization, here is a list of the most common components:
- Mission and values
You can introduce your business to new readers by including the mission and core values in the brand guidelines. This will help them understand what your organisation is about and what it stands for. In addition, the creative team gets more insight into your business to make design choices as per the guidelines.
Take a look at how DP Cement outlined its company mission and values. (We will show DP Cement’s brand guidelines as an example) - Logos
One of the most important parts of brand guidelines is to show logo variations of your brand, though you may not need to provide every iteration of it. Most brands choose to include a few logo iterations in their guidelines based on the situation and requirements, such as using a large logo size for a billboard or a front-page newspaper ad, or using a small logo for smaller ads and documents. Apart from that, brand guidelines include the required spacing and alignment that designers need to follow while using the brand logo for different purposes.
Here, the brand has defined how its logo must be used in its communication. - Colour palette
The colour palette in the brand guide ensures that the visual treatment of your logo and other marketing communication is maintained throughout. It comprises colour schemes of your logo listed down in hex codes, RGB numbers, CMYK, or Pantone names. Many brand guidelines make it easy for the designers by breaking up the colours into specific palettes. For example, mentioning the primary colours used across all channels and secondary colours as accents.
Check out the colour palette provided by DP Cement. - Typefaces
Typefaces provide a list of font styles and families and how the creative team should use them. It also includes helpful style guidelines such as the required sizing and spacing for the fonts. The typography leaves no room for designers to do guesswork, and ensures consistency across all mediums.
Typefaces used for DP Cement. - Iconography
If your brand has developed a specific style of communication, such as using doodles, particular types of photography etc., then you must provide its details in the brand guidelines. Dedicate a section in the brand guide that instructs what kind of imagery is acceptable to use and what should be avoided. - Tone
Don’t forget to share the tone of your brand’s visual identity in your brand guidelines. This helps ensure that your visual and messaging tone reflect the brand. Provide examples of the kind of tone you expect in your communication: should it be conversational? Informational? Humorous?
Conclusion
Always remember that your brand is more than the products or services you offer. You must aim to provide an experience to your target audience. That’s how successful brands are able to deviate themselves from their competitors. Those brands tell the world why the target audience should choose them. With the help of a brand guide, a company can define its branding path with tangible components such as a logo, tagline, brand voice, etc.
Want to create brand guidelines to define your brand identity? Connect with us!