“Rules are for fools”, said the Sex Pistols’ John Lydon, but that’s because he never saw a good set of brand guidelines. Your brand is a hot potato that might be handled by any number of people – your in-house designers, external agencies or Steve from IT – so it’s vital you have clear and solid rules of the road. With that in mind, we thought we’d put together a brand-spanking guide to the brand guideline dos and don’ts.
Imagine you’ve spent all that time coming up with a sexy Nike swoosh, then someone uses the wrong vector file and it looks like a broken hockey stick. In your brand guidelines, you should document all approved variations of your logo – including those used for light and dark backgrounds – so that your logo never looks like a fish out of water.
Visual impact matters, and your brand colours are the life of the party. But given the importance of colour – not just to your brand identity but in building affinity and rapport with your customers – don’t let anyone turn your glorious colour scheme into an unsightly splodge.
That means it’s a good idea to ensure your brand colours (primary and secondary) are referenced in your brand guidelines for both screen and print use.
Even if your brand font looks the bee’s knees, what if you can’t use it across different company assets? No one wants a Comic Sans nightmare, so choosing a fallback font for software like Microsoft Word can help you sleep at night.
More than two million people in the UK have some form of visual impairment or sight loss, so it’s really important that your brand guidelines include colour accessibility standards.
That means having an appropriate contrast ratio between your background and text colours on things like website buttons or the navigation, and the option for textured patterns – rather than block colours – for elements like graphs or charts.
And remember, colour accessibility doesn’t just apply to your online brand, but your marketing as a whole.
There’s no use creating awesome brand guidelines only to lose them down the back of the sofa. All your logo variations and brand bits should be packaged up nicely into a folder that the right people can access. That way, your team can respond to any asset requests in a simple hop, click ‘n’ jump.
Every business has a story to tell – even if you sell sliced bread for a living. Your brand guidelines are an opportunity to include your company bio so that everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet.
Visuals are vital, but great visuals without great storytelling is like watching Avatar on loop. When it comes to presenting your brand’s human side, nothing speaks louder than your tone of voice.
Even (and especially) in this age of ChatGPT, the way your brand communicates – both written and spoken language – is a key differentiator. Make room in your brand guidelines for some boilerplate copy lines and linguistic pointers.
When it comes to deploying your marketing assets, context is king. Different channels require a different approach, so if you’re targeting Gen-Z customers, don’t expect to find them on Ceefax.
Your brand guidelines should cover all bases and be adaptable enough for your people to pick ‘n’ mix the right asset at the right time.
It takes two to tango, but it takes tons of people to use brand guidelines properly. Resist the temptation to dump everything at marketing’s door, as it’s important that everyone in your company not only has access to your logos, fonts and design elements, but knows how to use them.
Your brand identity is simply too important to make it up as you go along. Even if you’ve not got the budget for a full set of brand guidelines, you could always build a simple brand board to ensure the way you present your business is consistent.
And besides, your brand guidelines can be a living, breathing document that you can update as your brand continues to evolve.
Just like Sudoku, it’s easy to get brand guidelines wrong. But when you partner with Visualise, you’ll have a team of branding experts on-hand to help you get the big calls right. Contact us for a free discovery call.