When you think of great brands, from Apple to Nike, design and branding are a big part of the package. From the infamous apple to the white tick, brand design plays a big part in who you are to your customers. So, the easiest way you can make sure your name is top of the list with potential clients? Good and consistent branding.
But staying on brand can be tough! Especially if you’re working with other people. Cue brand guidelines! These ensure that anyone who creates for your brand follows through with your designs, tone of voice and in return saves you time and money correcting mistakes. Quite simply, your guidelines are a collection of everything that makes your brand unique and houses the details down to the precise colour hex codes, typography choices and key brand values.
Your brand guidelines also play a big part in your wider brand strategy and wider business objectives.
What should my brand guidelines contain?
Let’s start with the basics. Your brand guidelines should outline how to use (and how not to use) your logo, fonts and colours, but also your brand adjectives, elevator pitch and mission statement.
Some brand guidelines also include messaging houses and dummy social media copy too. Here’s how you can incorporate some of these things into your brand strategy.
Your brand logo
It’s not just as simple as pasting your logo into a Word doc. Logos should always be outlined with clear minimum space requirements. This stops your logo from getting stretched and distorted. It sounds basic, but it can be all too easy to turn a stunning piece of branding design into a warped mess if you’re not too careful. Your logos should also be clearly laid out so that you can safeguard against anyone misrepresenting your brand.
Some brands choose to have secondary and sub-mark logos too. If you decide to have these, make sure that the person using the brand guidelines knows exactly where and how to use each of these. This includes formats for web and print along with instructions on how it should appear with other assets, like taglines. This ensures that brand integrity is never compromised.
If you want to play it safe, you can include logo treatments that designers and users should avoid, ensuring that logos are always applied correctly and consistently.
Your brand fonts
Typography plays a big part in your brand’s tone of voice. And, if you’ve been on Twitter recently, you’ll know that a lot of fonts take on personalities all their own. By using the right font-face, or font type for your business, you can help to develop your overall brand message.
For example, you wouldn’t use Comic Sans* to write a police report but it would work well for primary school educational material. Relevancy plays a huge role in effective font choices too. Baskerville Serif for a nursery would be harsh, but in a publication setting, it makes text easier to read and is instantly recognisable.
(*as designers, we wouldn’t advocate that you use Comic Sans anyway…)
Editing the number of fonts you use is also just as important. Having an array of different fonts tells your audience, clients, partners and sponsors that you don’t know who you are yet. The selection process might feel a little bit like choosing the right shade of white at times, but this attention to detail will have a huge impact on your brand trust.
It’s not unusual for brands to focus on up to three different fonts for different things, but they should always complement each other and work together to carry your brand messaging, instead of fighting with it. Essentially, fonts are the window to the brand’s soul so choosing well is imperative.
In your brand guidelines, you should include your chosen fonts along with their weights and a web-safe alternative, if necessary. Be sure to distinguish between fonts used for titles versus body copy, and include formatting preferences for the copy too. This will ensure that everything is used where and when it should be.
Your brand colours
Colours, much like fonts, help carry the brand tone. And, it also tells the audience how they should feel. Colour theory can help you determine the right hue and tone to position your brand in the right marketplace.
A great example of this is Deliveroo’s instantly recognisable turquoise. It has a fresh and youthful feel, which is perfect for their target audience of 20-35-year-olds who prefer to order restaurant-quality food when they’re pushed for time, or the McDonald's yellow, a siren call to children everywhere.
Once you’ve chosen your colours, list their RGB, CMYK and hex codes. These help designers and developers keep elements like buttons consistent across multiple web pages and in print.
Brand strategy
It’s not all about the visual when it comes to branding, your brand identity is so much more than your logo and your appearances. It’s an experience that you give to your audience, and it what your customers say about you when you’re not in the room. In order to convey a consistent brand message, you should always include brand strategy in your guidelines too.
Brand Adjectives
Decide upon five words to describe your brand. Come back to them and check that your brand is staying true to itself. For example, you may include words like these if you’re a skincare brand like Ohana;
● Youthful
● Vegan
● Soothing
● Natural
● Fresh
Instantly, you have a strong picture of the sort of brand that Ohana is. And, this is exactly what you want for your brand.
Your target audience
Sometimes it can be difficult to pinpoint who your audience is, especially if you have a wide demographic that stretches across age groups. One way to sort through this is by creating personas. For example, you may own a coffee shop that specialises in fair trade organic coffee. Your audience is most likely to be adults, who appreciate the importance of fair trade and probably have a little bit more in their pocket to spend than the average person. From this, you can gather that they are more likely to respond well to sustainable items and initiatives.
Knowing this means that when you’re creating new concepts, products or services that you’re designing for your ideal customer and not for yourself.
Your brand goals
These could be your mission statements or core beliefs. But, knowing your brand goals when writing your mission statement and examples will help you to see how your brand demonstrates its goals and identity.
Brand guidelines are essential to keep your brand identity consistent, recognisable, and ownable. Since a style guide defines the guidelines for maintaining a brand’s identity, it’s important to spend the time and resources to get it right. And, while we don’t want to toot our own horn, here at Studio 77, we do just that.
We offer two packages that cover everything you need from start to finish. Become bulletproof with our three-step Bulletproof Branding package that starts from the ground up, building you a brand that stands the test of time. And if you’ve already got something on the go we can help you transform it with our Brand Bootcamp package, taking it from basic to bespoke.
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