Branding
Brand guidelines
Brand guidelines are the document defining how a brand may be used: permitted and forbidden logo usage, colours, typefaces, writing style and photography. It is the binding reference for suppliers and employees alike.
What it means in practice
The practical value of guidelines shows up with your third supplier. Without them everyone gets the logo by email and fills in the rest themselves, which means paying for the same decision again and again and still getting a different result.
It does not have to be an eighty page book. For a small company a ten page document somebody actually reads beats a sprawling system that ends up as an unopened PDF on a drive.