Are you a company that is just starting out? Maybe you’ve been around for decades, and you get that ick feeling when you see visuals your company puts out. Perhaps there has just been a changing of the guard (for ownership or leadership), and investing in improving your website, materials, and branding is the first item on your organization’s list. Then the topic of brand guidelines is a hot one to discuss and learn more about! Let’s dig in.
What are Brand Guidelines?
In short, these are documents that provide guidance to an organization or company in the use of its brand. Brand guidelines encapsulate the colors, typography, photography examples, corporate material examples, layout anatomy, patterns, textures, dos and don’ts, and more.
What is included in Brand Guidelines?
At 4CDesignWorks, we tailor these documents to your specific branding needs. They can vary in size, from a one-page reference to multi-page documents to even booklets (seriously, I’ve seen ones that are hundreds of pages long… that is not an exaggeration)! Companies or organizations have different needs, which guide the decisions to expand or truncate this helpful tool.
Logo Lockups
Logo lockups are essential to having a flexible brand. You need the logo to work in a variety of sizes from horizontal, to stacked, to vertical, to square (for the social media butterflies out there).
If your organization doesn’t have a responsive logo, you might need to reach out and contact us today for crimes against your company’s growth!
Logo Placement & Clear Spacing
These are popular inclusions to police the use of logo options. More often used in larger booklets, these help with determining what logo lockup to use and where to place it.
Colors
Brand identities often have primary color options, and some need secondary color options. Color makes a huge impact on viewers, so it’s a must for any brand initiative.
Not only that, but ensuring the brand color values are as consistently reproduced as possible maintains the appearance across different media. This can be tricky as some colors simply don’t reproduce in CMYK as they do in Pantone or RGB. A guide is vital for this task, and we include it with any of our brand guideline options!
Textures & Patterns
Brands are intended to create something of a visual ecosystem. Just like color, textures and patterns that can be reused and help bring another touch that visually states “this is Company A” compared to what the competition may be doing.
Patterns are particularly powerful as they can be used as a graphic element in supportive materials such as social networking templates or any/all corporate materials.
While this may be optional to some, including these in brand guidelines can be a must! Product packaging that utilizes patterns sometimes carries the weight of a visual identity.
Typography & Fonts
Suggested fonts for the brand are complementary to the logo and provide a typographic system for creating branded materials (headlines, body copy, and examples of usage).
For some brand guidelines, we’ve included typesetting guides to help promote readability at different sizes.
Company Statements (Mission, Vision, Boilerplate text)
This information can be helpful if a revised or new and unified direction for the company is needed. While not always included, it does help drive home what the personality of the organization is.
We won’t comment on whether some of these are intentionally over-crafted to the point that eyes roll, but usually we just reserve those thoughts for brand guidelines that seem to have the page added to hit some kind of quota by other design agencies 😊
Slogans & Taglines
These text descriptions paired with logos are important to many organizations that sometimes need that bit extra to explain what the company does.
Sub-Branding, Divisions & Partnerships
Has your brand grown to include several sister companies or divisions that require them all to have the same appearance? International companies tend to include this as a way to show how the brand logo is to be used with others.
In some cases, divisions have their very own set of instructions such as color, logo icon, tagline, and/or lockup display!
Corporate Materials
Examples of corporate materials come at the request of companies that know they will need to reproduce things on a larger scale. Regional companies that have hundreds of staff members often opt to have a section on corporate materials to help them as they grow.
Corporate identity materials like stationery, such as business cards and letterhead, are popular. These files are often provided as part of the package, so they can be provided to print vendors as needed. It is also good protection to ensure that the organization has ownership over these files.
Layout Anatomy
Didn’t think you would be attending a science class when reading about artwork? Well, some art started as science (paint colors had to be figured out and mixed y’know)! This is a term we’ve used for creating corporate materials by showing a breakdown of particular corporate materials. The layout, clear spacing, alignment, use of color, patterns, and preferences to create consistent displays.
These are particularly helpful for items that would be replicated many times over. For example, a booklet cover.
Often, a section like this would be accompanied by source files, so internal staff can assemble these as needed, while retaining the brand consistency. It is particularly useful for non-profits and community-focused organizations.
Other guides include insight (or detailed instructions) on creating materials like on-screen displays and/or more complex advertisements.
Photography Examples
Photography is a big deal to companies. Having a reference that gives some visual clues as to what to use is common in larger brand guides. It isn’t all encompassing, but it often gives artistic direction on what images to look for. Composition, colors, orientation – these can be helpful things to keep in mind when hunting for photos.
In the past, we’ve included a photo grid to illustrate this, going so far as to create public/shared galleries on royalty-free and stock photography resources.
Custom Icons
We’ve been known to get carried away with this topic, but we can’t help it! Icons are just so cool. Beyond that, they help add a visual graphic to break up content in a variety of ways.
Custom iconography is a great support system to put in place for highlighting/differentiating services and capabilities, steps in a defined and customized process, indicating different user types, and more.
Brand Assets & Source Files
Unarguably, the most important section to have within brand guidelines are the actual files needed to implement the brand! A bonus if there is a section that tells the guide user the file names, so they don’t have to try to guess.
What if Something is Missing From the Brand Guidelines?
Ideally, they are self-explanatory in usage! Sometimes things fall through the cracks, or a brand is just too new that some instances end up as edge cases. We’ve seen this in the case of sub-brands, or a product, or web application that was 90% completed and needed to be adjusted due to an international company rebrand officially launched causing the need for a course correction. This is often why brand guidelines come with a version and/or date applied.
Things change, and these documents should grow with your company as things happen. Adding completely new sections or amending them a decade down the line is nothing new to us!
We promise not to name the file something with “final_final_final” in it 😊
I Need a Brand Guide!
That’s great news, and 4CDesignWorks can certainly help. Although we probably should have a discussion first to outline your existing brand and particular needs. Get in touch with us about our branding services, process, capabilities, and we’ll start there.