Blog, Brand, 5 min read
What brand guidelines must include, and what to skip
A brand guidelines document only works if people use it. The sections it must have, the ones that are nice to have, and the ones nobody reads.
Most brand guidelines are written once, exported as a sixty page PDF and never opened again. Then six months later someone makes a sales deck with a stretched logo and the wrong blue, and everyone wonders why the brand feels inconsistent.
The problem is rarely that the guidelines were wrong. It is that they were written to impress at the handover, not to be used on a Tuesday afternoon by someone in a hurry. A good guidelines document is short, practical and built around the things people actually make.
Start with who will use it
Before deciding what goes in, list the people who will open it. Usually that is your own team making slides and social posts, a freelance designer making ads, a developer building the website, and a printer or signage supplier. Each of them needs different things.
The marketing team needs ready-made files and simple rules. The developer needs colour codes, type sizes and spacing in a form they can copy. The printer needs CMYK and Pantone values and file formats. If the document serves all four, it works. If it only serves the designer who wrote it, it will be ignored.
The sections it must have
These are the parts we would never leave out, whatever the size of the business.
- Logo: every approved version (full, stacked, icon only), the clear space around it, the smallest size it can be used at, and which version goes on light and dark backgrounds.
- Logo misuse: a short page of what not to do. Stretching, recolouring, adding shadows, placing it on busy photos. People learn faster from wrong examples.
- Colour: primary and secondary colours with HEX, RGB, CMYK and, if you print a lot, Pantone values. Say which colour is used most and which ones are accents.
- Typography: the typefaces, where to get them, and a simple hierarchy for headings, subheadings and body text. Include a fallback font for tools like PowerPoint and Google Slides where your brand font may not be available.
- Imagery: what kind of photography or illustration fits the brand, with a few examples of right and wrong.
- Tone of voice: three or four short principles with before and after examples. This is the section people skip writing and then miss most.
- Files: where the logo files, templates and fonts live, and which format to use for what.
Colour needs more than a swatch
The colour page is where most guidelines fall short. A swatch with a HEX code tells you what the blue is. It does not tell you how much of it to use, which colours can sit on top of it, or what to do with charts.
Add a simple proportion guide, for example mostly white with the primary colour as the accent. Show which text colours pass contrast checks on which backgrounds, so nobody puts light grey text on your pale brand colour. And if your team makes reports or decks, define a chart palette: the order colours are used in a chart, and a neutral grey for context data. That one page saves more inconsistency than any other.
Typography that works in real tools
Your brand typeface probably looks great in Figma. It may not exist on your sales team's laptops, and Google Slides cannot use fonts that are not in its library. When that happens, PowerPoint swaps in a default font and every deck looks slightly off.
So the guidelines should name a system-safe fallback for office tools, and the templates should be built with it. It is better to have a deck in a sensible fallback font than one that breaks on every machine it is opened on.
The sections that are nice to have
These are worth adding once the basics are solid, or if your business needs them.
- Layout grids and spacing rules for print and digital.
- Iconography style, if you use icons a lot on your site or in product.
- Motion principles, if you make video or animated content.
- Co-branding rules for partnerships and sponsorships.
- Examples of the brand applied: business cards, social posts, slides, signage, email signatures.
The applied examples are often the most used pages in the whole document. People copy what they can see.
What you can skip
Some sections look impressive and do very little. A long brand story at the front, a page of mood words, a philosophy behind every curve of the logo. If it does not help someone make the next thing correctly, it belongs in a pitch to your board, not in the guidelines.
The same goes for length. A small business usually needs fifteen to twenty five pages. A larger organisation with many teams and suppliers may need more, but even then it is better to split it: a short core document, and separate guides for web, print and presentations.
Make it easy to follow
Guidelines fail quietly when following them takes effort. The fix is to remove the effort.
- Ship templates with the guidelines: slides, social posts, letterhead, email signature.
- Put the logo files in a shared folder with clear names, not a zip file in someone's inbox.
- Use the colour codes and type scale directly in your website's code and your design tool's library.
- Name one person who owns the brand and answers questions.
When the right thing is also the easy thing, people do it.
A quick test for your current guidelines
Hand your guidelines to someone new and ask them to make a social post and a two slide presentation. Watch where they get stuck. Every question they ask is a gap in the document. Every shortcut they take is a rule that was too hard to follow.
If you are starting from scratch or your current guidelines have drifted, our logo and brand identity guidelines package covers the logo, the system around it and the guidelines document itself. You can also read more about how we approach brand identity.