Brand guidelines

Brand guidelines have a fixed contents page: the logo with its clear space and minimum size, forbidden uses, colours with codes, typography with hierarchy, photo and video style, the tone of writing, and examples of finished applications. The designer who made the identity writes them, after approval rather than before. They ship as a PDF with a folder of source files beside it.

The value shows up with your third supplier. A manufacturer coming out of a rebrand deals with a printer, a web developer and a company building the fair stand. Without guidelines each of them gets the logo by email and invents the rest. That means paying for the same decision three times and getting three results. An extra art direction hour per supplier costs more than the document.

Writing them takes one to two weeks once the identity is approved. The client decides three things: who owns the document, where it lives so everyone can find it, and who approves exceptions. We also need the list of people and suppliers who will use it, otherwise we are writing brand guidelines for nobody in particular.

It does not have to be an eighty page book. For a small company, ten pages somebody reads beats a volume nobody opens. Agencies sell page count, though thickness is not value. The other common fault is guidelines that only forbid. With no example of a good looking application, a supplier has nothing to aim at and will play it safe.

We put a one page cheat sheet at the very front: logo, colour codes, typefaces and the three rules broken most often. The rest of the brand guidelines is for people going deeper. The test we apply: if a new supplier cannot start work after page one, we wrote it badly. Try it on a colleague who was not in the project.