The Importance of Brand Guidelines

When bui

lding a new brand from scratch or revitalising and refreshing an existing brand, as any good marketer or business owner knows, brand equity and visual consistency are everything!

Making sure that every customer touchpoint is aligned is not an easy task, of course. Still, having a reference - in essence, rules about what to do (and not do!), with explanations on how your brand should be applied in real-world situations, makes sure that your marketing communications are on-point regardless of which person, department or even an external supplier is delivering and executing on them.

Generally speaking, guidelines should at a minimum cover.

• Logos • Colours • Typography

But could also include... • Brand strategy • Tone of voice • Value proposition • Positioning • Content themes • Photographic style • Iconography • PowerPoint/Keynote • Social Media • Business cards • Marketing collateral

There is a general misunderstanding (propagated in my opinion by the design industry) that brand guidelines need to be an expensive, weighty PDF tome that inevitably gathers dust in physical form or sits in a file somewhere that nobody within your team can locate on the server.

To be honest, this is likely overkill for many SMEs or microbusinesses that realistically only need the basics covered, such as: • How the logo should be used in certain circumstances (for example, in a presentation deck on a colourful background or in a letterbox format) • What the hex codes are for your digital colour scheme (these are the 6-digit codes that are used in HTML and CSS) • Which fonts are used, and where they can be downloaded (for example, the Montserrat typeface from Google Fonts)

At a minimum, you should also have access to the original logo artwork, including both a solid colour black version and a white version. Typically, these would be in a .AI or .EPS file format, as well as PNGs, JPEGs and SVGs.

Ensuring that you have all of this information is particularly important if you need to get something professionally printed, as you will definitely be asked for your logo files and also your CMYK or Pantone colours. It's so much easier and less stressful knowing that you can provide all of this yourself, rather than having to go back to your original designer or agency to ask - especially if you no longer work together!

During the initial creation of a Brand Identity, ask your design team to set up Canva templates for you, ensuring that everything is in place visually so you don't have to worry about making a mistake or misrepresenting anything. This could also include a range of templates, sized correctly for various social media platforms, that allow you to change up photos and content. In fact, what has become more popular in the last 12-18 months is online Brand Guidelines built within Webflow, Brandpad or Frontify, allowing your brand to live and breathe in a much more engaging way, particularly in a digital-first world. Dropbox (a familiar name to everyone) has done this superbly and has produced a great reference that anyone within the business can utilise.

Please see a link here - https://brand.dropbox.com/

The main advantage of this approach is that everything is available on a link, which can be saved as a bookmark in a web browser, ensuring that it's instantly accessible to everybody - no more searching around! Version control also becomes very easy, as the latest version is the only one that everybody has access to. No more trying to work out if the PDF you are looking at is the most recent edition or has been superseded without your knowledge. Nobody wants to be caught using something that is no longer relevant and fall foul of the brand police!

From my personal experience, a problem often encountered with guidelines is that they were created without the online world in mind. This is particularly true when a brand agency creates a new brand identity, but the identity is rolled out digitally by a separate website agency. This happens more often than you'd think, and often leads to a situation where what looks good on a page or in theory doesn't really work in practice on a smaller screen, such as a tablet or phone.

In summary, if your business has a robust set of guidelines, it can visually protect its reputation (internally and externally) when scaling. Multinational brands take this incredibly seriously and spend lots of money to achieve it, but it really doesn't need to be cost-prohibitive to put in place. It's also possible to retrospectively create guidelines following an audit of an existing brand identity and marketing communications, so even if you have recently rebranded, it's never too late to get your brand house in order.

About the author Simon Cook is a Fractional Creative Director with more than 20 years of experience in the design industry. If you need his advice or would like him to assess your own brand, please do reach out to him.