Searching for what a brand guidelines document should contain usually ends in a list of sections and a template. The more useful question is why the document exists at all. A brand guidelines document is a savings tool: it cuts a designer's setup time on every future job, removes a round of revisions and stops your brand from looking different every time. Here is what the contents should include, a simple calculation of what it saves, and an honest note on when you can skip it.
Key takeaways
- Companies estimate that consistent brand presentation raises revenue by about 23% on average, according to the Lucidpress, now Marq, and Demand Metric survey. It is self-reported by marketers, not a controlled experiment, so treat it as direction, not a guarantee.
- Marketers waste almost an hour of every workday, roughly 10%, hunting for logos, images and old files, according to a survey by Brandworkz. A brand guidelines document removes most of that search.
- In McKinsey's 2018 Business Value of Design study of more than 300 companies, the strongest design-led firms grew revenue at roughly twice the industry-average rate.
- The saving is not in the document itself. It is in never having to reinvent those decisions again. You pay once and draw on it a hundred times.
- Below you get a plain-euros calculation and a one-page minimum checklist any small company can build.
What should a brand guidelines document contain?
A brand guidelines document is a set of rules for how your brand looks and sounds, so it stays the same everywhere. A good one is not a gallery, it is an instruction manual. At a minimum, a useful brand guidelines document contents list looks like this:
- logo: versions, minimum size, clear space, and what you must never do to it,
- colour: exact HEX, RGB and CMYK values, plus when to use each,
- typography: primary and secondary fonts, sizes for headings and body,
- imagery: the style of photos and illustrations, with yes and no examples,
- tone of voice: how the brand writes, with a few sample sentences,
- templates: business card, deck, email header, social formats,
- misuse examples: the part most guides skip and the part that helps most.
Notice the last item. Most guides show how things should look. The genuinely useful ones also show how they must not look, because that is exactly where people go wrong. The team at Tenet has a solid breakdown of what a brand guidelines document should include if you want a longer list.
How does a brand guidelines document save money on every job?
By making the decisions once. Without a guide, every new graphic, flyer or deck reopens the same questions: which blue is the right blue, which font, how big is the logo, where does it sit. With a guide, a designer opens one page and gets to work.
That hunting costs real time. According to a survey by Brandworkz, marketers spend almost an hour of every workday searching for logos, images and old materials. Without a single source of truth, each job also adds an extra revision round, the familiar that is not our blue, which you pay for in time on both sides.
The second saving is less visible and larger. A consistent brand simply sells better. In the Lucidpress, now Marq, and Demand Metric survey, companies estimated that a unified brand presentation lifts revenue by about 23% on average. That number is self-reported rather than lab-tested, but it matches what we see: a brand that looks the same everywhere reads as bigger and more trustworthy than it really is, and trust shortens the path to a sale.
We watch the same thing play out on social. When a profile has one consistent look, the posts read as one brand rather than five different people with Canva. We wrote about how that plays out in our guides to Instagram Reels for businesses and LinkedIn content for B2B.
How much does it actually save? A quick calculation
Let us use a model, not a price list. Say a company produces twenty design outputs a year: social posts, an offer document, an event roll-up, a deck.
Without a guide, each output loses roughly an extra hour hunting for the right elements, and often one revision round, because the result does not match how the brand looked last time. At a designer rate of around 30 euros an hour, the hunting alone is about 600 euros a year, plus your own team's time on fixes and approvals that never lands on an invoice but costs you anyway.
A brand guidelines document wipes out most of that cost. Not because it is magic, but because you pay for it once and draw on it for every job after. The more outputs you produce a year, the faster it pays back. In our experience at NORDLYS, a simple guide covers its own cost within about half a year at a normal workload, and only saves money after that.
To run your own number, multiply your yearly outputs by one extra hour and your designer rate. That is the floor. The real saving tends to be higher, because it also counts the revisions and the fact that a consistent brand sells.
When is a brand guidelines document not worth it?
Straight talk, even though we are a studio that makes these documents. They do not always make sense, and sometimes they are wasted money.
The first case is starting too early. If you are a startup before product-market fit and the whole brand may change in six months, a fifty-page guide is premature. One page with the basics is enough, and you finish the rest once you know who you actually are.
The second case is the drawer document. A beautiful eighty-page file no one opens saves nothing. The value is not in the page count, it is in whether people actually use it. One clear page everyone keeps handy beats a brochure only the designer has seen.
The third case is over-rigid rules. A guide that forbids everything kills good ideas too. Good rules set guardrails, not a straitjacket. In our creative work we keep a simple rule: a guide should solve nine of ten everyday situations and leave the tenth to judgement.
Frequently asked questions about brand guidelines
What is the difference between a brand guidelines document and a logo guide?
A logo guide covers only the logo: its versions, clear space and sizing. A brand guidelines document is broader and includes colour, typography, tone of voice, imagery and templates, so the whole output stays consistent, not just the mark on paper.
How many pages should a brand guidelines document have?
As many as it takes to cover your everyday outputs, and not one page more. A small company works fine with one to five pages, a larger organisation needs more. Usefulness beats thickness every time.
Who should create the brand guidelines document?
A designer or studio builds it together with you, because it needs both the rules and the source files. You bring the business context, the studio turns it into clear, usable rules and templates.
We are a small company, is it worth it?
Yes, even a single page. The more outputs you produce a year, the faster it pays back, because you stop paying a designer to rediscover your brand on every job.
If you are not sure whether one page is enough or you need a full guide, drop us a line. We will look at how many outputs you really produce a year and tell you straight whether a guide will pay off, or whether you should wait a little longer.
