Building a brand guide

A brand guide is an essential tool in establishing the unique character of your business, event or campaign. It translates your brand’s identity into clear design guidelines, setting quality standards which allow internal and external teams to speak with the same creative voice and achieve consistency across all communications. This in turn enhances awareness, recognition, credibility and trust in your brand.

Here we provide a list of considerations when building a brand guide.

Brand identity

Before outlining the visual aspects of your brand guide, you first need to define your identity. This means getting to the very essence of your brand in order to tell the world what you stand for and what sets you apart from your competitors.

To do this you will need to establish the following:

Your story – a compelling history from inception to the present with a narrative structure that brings it to life

Your mission – your purpose and objectives, what you are setting out to do and the impact you want to have

Your vision – long-term aspirations, where are you going and what do you want to achieve?

Your target audience – likely customers. The group of people most likely to want your product or service, defined by characteristics such as income, location, demographics, age, gender etc. You can create customer personas - fictional, composite characters that represent segments of your audience, based on research, surveys and interviews

Your personality – a set of human characteristics that can be attributed to your brand, for example: sophistication, ruggedness, sincerity

Tone of voice – what you say and how you say it, writing, grammar and copy guidelines, for example: informal, humorous, formal, serious

Your core values – the beliefs and guiding principles that underly your company culture and which are reflected in everything you do

Once you have decided on these important characteristics, they should influence and infuse all the visual elements of your brand.

Visual identity

First impressions are often visual so it is essential for your visual identity to reflect your brand values and personality and be instantly recognisable and relatable across different media. When defining your identity you will need to decide on the following elements:

Logo – primary logo with image, company name and guidelines for its placement and usage depending on space, together with options for dark, light and mixed colour backgrounds. Secondary logos can also be created for use in situations where the primary logo is unnecessary or won’t fit

Colour palette – primary and secondary colours with CMYK/RGB values, Pantone codes and hex codes as relevant

Typography – typefaces and font styles with size, weight, hierarchy and spacing guidelines

Iconography – signs and symbols, for example: social media icons, mobile app buttons and company templates, which work with your logos, typography and company colours to create a unified look

Imagery – use of photography, animation and illustrations. Define your style, for example: candid, informal, posed, professional or casual and if you don’t already have one, consider building a library of brand-approved images

Implementation

Once all these elements have been agreed, you can create a comprehensive guide clearly outlining your identity and approved assets in a shareable format. Make sure your guide has a striking cover page including company logo and title, a table of contents and points of contact. This will constitute a manual on when and how your visual assets can be used by anyone in your organisation, creative partners and marketing agencies in order to effectively and consistently represent your brand.

A cohesive brand guide allows you to communicate your unique brand personality and stay on brand across all strategic materials from website to social media, emails, ads, annual reports, corporate presentations to business cards.

We hope these guidelines will assist you in creating a perfectly formed brand guide which communicates your identity clearly. The Ingenious Design team are here to help you devise and develop a comprehensive brand guide. We can also assist in refreshing and updating an existing one in order to stay current.