Table of Contents
- Brand Guidelines Definition & Meaning
- What Are Brand Guidelines?
- 10 Types of Brand Guidelines
- Brand Guidelines Uses, Purpose, Importance
- What’s in Brand Guidelines? Parts?
- How to Design Brand Guidelines
- Brand Guidelines vs. Brand Book
- What’s the Difference Between Brand Guidelines, a Style Guide & a Design System?
- Brand Guidelines Ideas
- FAQs
- More in Brand Guidelines
Brand Guidelines
Brand guidelines are essential guides used to construct the overall composition, design, and appearance of one’s branding identity. Creating clear and cohesive guidelines for the branding of businesses and organizations is an important way to communicate their brands effectively to their target audience.
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Brand Guidelines Definition & Meaning
Brand guidelines are well-defined rules and standards that help different businesses, companies, groups, and institutions to communicate and represent their brand identities properly to the world.
Also known as brand style guides, brand guidelines are efficient tools to allow companies to make their branding memorable and long-lasting in the minds of the people.
What Are Brand Guidelines?
Brand guidelines contain all the visual components, voice, tone, and messaging of a business or an organization. These style guides help firms and organizations to make sure that their overall brand image has consistency and reliability to build and solidify brand awareness and brand loyalty.
10 Types of Brand Guidelines
Marketing Brand Guidelines
These brand guidelines are used to help set the tone, style, and voice of the brands for marketing purposes. Use this compelling set of marketing brand guidelines to easily communicate the marketing strategy to the teams in charge of the branding identity of the company. Download our sample brand style guides for the marketing of your brand here.
Graphic Brand Guidelines
If you are currently working on a graphic design brand, these brand guidelines are useful brand style guides to assist you in establishing the vibe of your graphic design brand. Choose the right brand colors and fonts for your branding identity. Professionally showcase your brand while using our sample graphic brand guidelines template below.
Floral Brand Guidelines
Flower shops and businesses use dainty and mellow color palettes and elegant designs for their branding identity. They use brand guidelines to construct the key components and structure of their brand to entice their customers which includes floral-inspired logo design, tagline, and many others. We suggest that you download our customizable floral brand guidelines from our template collection.
Skincare Brand Guidelines
Make your skincare brand unique from the rest of the skincare brands out there while using brand guidelines. This tool will help you to accentuate the purpose and identity of your skincare brand. We recommend that you use our minimalistic skincare brand guidelines mockup template so that you can create enticing visual elements for your skincare brand.
Business Brand Guidelines
Clarify the message and story of your business using well-structured brand guidelines. Take your time to research what appeals to the senses of your intended customers, as well as work on the internal and external branding of your business. So, easily download and use our editable business brand guidelines layout template here below.
Product Brand Guidelines
Develop an effective brand strategy for your products and services. Know what specific element of your products that stands out from the public and look for their unique selling point. Use our free sample product brand guidelines mockup template to structure the visual brand identity of your product.
Restaurant Brand Guidelines
The restaurant industry nowadays is getting more crowded and competitive than ever before, so you need to use effective brand guidelines to build and solidify your restaurant brand to attract restaurant customers. Use brand guidelines to create a restaurant brand that will truly resonate with your customers. Here are some premade restaurant brand guidelines that you can easily customize based on your needs and preferences.
Author Brand Guidelines
Authors write books to communicate their messages and perspectives to their readers while offering them solutions to their problems. That’s why they need to focus on their branding identity to tell their readers how their books can help them. Create a sophisticated author brand while using our unique author brand guidelines mockup template to tell people in a visual sense why they should read your book instead of the hundreds of other authors out there.
Music Brand Guidelines
Design a visually aesthetic music brand for musical artists, musicians, and singers. Highlight the musician or the music company’s reflection of their overall identity, message, personality, ambitions, music, and values while developing their music brand. Simply download and use our music brand guidelines layout template and personalize it so that you can innovate a music brand that will impact your target audience.
Fitness Brand Guidelines
Successful fitness branding should have consistency across multiple touchpoints such as in your social media, website, and both your in-person and virtual workouts. When you build a fitness brand, it is essential that you strategically think and carefully plan to cultivate a wholesome image while standing out from the public. Download and use our sample fitness brand guidelines template for your fitness brand so that you can work on your visual brand identity in an organized way.
Brand Guidelines Uses, Purpose, Importance
Brand guidelines provide a wide array of uses and purposes in numerous brands, businesses, companies, and organizations. These tools use many principles and visual elements to build coherent brands such as logo design, typography, layout, color palette, photography, font, iconography, symbols, shape, contrast, dimension, consistency, story, and voice. Below is a list of the common uses, purposes, and importance of brand guidelines.
Sets Rules and Standards
Using brand guidelines when creating the visual identity of your brand is important because this tool establishes specific rules and standards by which you can use the brand elements properly. It includes examples of how you should use and not use those logos and rules about clear spacing around logos, and many other rules and standards.
Maintains Clarity and Organization
Brand guidelines are integral tools to maintain clarity and organization, especially if you are planning to scale your business or simply add new employees. New employees in your business or organization won’t know the rules of your brand identity right away, so these guidelines are made to avoid any confusion and maintain the brand elements organized.
Keeps Brand Coherence and Consistency
For your brand to become coherent and consistent, you need to use brand guidelines to streamline all key visual elements for your brand identity. This helps in building a powerful and recognizable brand.
Makes Simple Communication
What makes branding compelling is the simplicity and relevance of the message it communicates to the public. With brand guidelines, you can develop a customer-centric brand without using nine pages of incredible information to showcase your brand.
What’s in Brand Guidelines? Parts?
Logo Design
Logos can be pictures, literal illustrations of a product or service, and/or symbolic representations of an idea or metaphor associated with the mission and vision of a business or an organization. Include some variations of your logo design in your brand guidelines.
Color Palette
As color communicates at the speed of light, it delivers an immediate emotional quality to a brand. Create a specific color palette when you consider the right colors for your brand starting with the hue, saturation, and brightness of the colors, as well as complementary colors, additive colors, and/or subtractive colors, or use multiple color schemes to add vibrancy to your brand.
Typography
Typography focuses on words, typically on the initials or name of the brand, business, or organization. Play with various letterforms, typefaces, and families to highlight the main elements of your brand and represent new meanings.
Graphic Elements, Symbols, and Wordmarks
Several graphic elements are used for your logo and branding including lines, shapes, textures, and images, as well as symbols and wordmarks. Add personality to your brand content using symbols, and/or create a typographic representation of your brand using a wordmark.
Brand tone
Create a tone profile for your brand when you define your brand tone. Brand tone refers to how your brand communicates with your audience through communication style, emotional tone, and word choice.
How to Design Brand Guidelines
1. Choose a Brand Guidelines Size
2. Think carefully about the purpose of your Brand Guidelines
3. Select the Brand Guidelines Template
4. Develop a compelling brand story
5. Add the color palette of your brand
6. Select typography that connects to your visual style
7. Edit, finalize, and download your brand guidelines
Brand Guidelines vs. Brand Book
Brand guidelines are a set of rules and standards used by brand designers, businesses, and other professionals to utilize brand elements in an orderly manner when it comes to building brand identity.
A brand book is a type of book which contains the overall visual brand identity of a business or an organization which includes the founding principles, mission, vision, values, logo design, colors, and other graphic elements.
What’s the Difference Between Brand Guidelines, a Style Guide & a Design System?
Brand guidelines are used to construct the framework of the brand identities of businesses and organizations and guide them in developing decisions and creating systems in their brands effectively for better customer experience and increased brand loyalty.
A style guide, also known as the manual of style, is a set of requirements and standards for writing, designing, formatting, and designing brands, graphic designs, and documents to ensure consistency across multiple designs and documents.
A design system is a comprehensive collection of visual elements that can be utilized by teams during the design process, realization, and development of a product.
Brand guidelines have different standard sizes and are available in print and digital. The brand guidelines sizes and formats are based on the use and purpose of the brand, business, group, organization, or professional for their brand presentations or other projects.
| Format | Orientation | Size in Inches | Size in Centimeters | Size in Millimeters |
| Letter (US) | Landscape | 8.5 x 11 | 21.59 x 27.94 | 215.9 x 279.4 |
| A4 | Landscape | 8.26 x 11.69 | 21 x 29.7 | 210 x 297 |
Brand Guidelines Ideas & Examples
There are eclectic ways to express your creative prowess when it comes to designing brand guidelines. Check out the following details for more brand guidelines ideas and design inspiration.
- Brand Guidelines Ideas and Examples
- One-page Brand Guidelines Ideas and Examples
- Company Brand Guidelines Ideas and Examples
- Lifestyle Brand Guidelines Ideas and Examples
- Minimalist Brand Guidelines Ideas and Examples
- Corporate Brand Guidelines Ideas and Examples
- Beauty Brand Guidelines Ideas and Examples
- Coffee Shop Brand Guidelines Ideas and Examples
- Fashion Brand Guidelines Ideas and Examples
- Elegant Brand Guidelines Ideas and Examples
FAQs
What should brand guidelines include?
Brand guidelines should include rules and standards for official logo usage, font type, and color, typography, brand tone, as well as the mission statement, identity, positioning, and values of the brand.
What are brand identity guidelines?
Brand identity guidelines provide the overall brand identity of a business or an organization including its logos, color palette, typography, imagery, graphic elements, and brand voice and tone.
What do brand guidelines do?
Brand guidelines allow businesses to control the way other people use their brands while making sure that the visual appearance remains on the optimal standard.
What is the impact of brand guidelines in business?
Brand guidelines in business help companies streamline their branding elements consistently.
What makes a good brand guideline?
A good brand guideline should have full logos, secondary logos, icons, primary and secondary colors, font styles, sizes, spacing, imagery, and brand tone.
How can brand guidelines be improved?
To improve your brand guidelines, keep your set of brand guidelines simple, make it easily accessible, and easy to update and it should have the appearance and vibe of your brand.
What are the key features of brand guidelines?
The key features of brand guidelines are logo and logo guide, main color palette, typography, and imagery.
Why is it necessary to follow brand guidelines?
It is very important to follow brand guidelines because it is an essential tool to ensure brand consistency.
What is the rule of brand guidelines?
The rule of brand guidelines explains how businesses and organizations should represent their brand to the world.
What are brand guidelines for employees?
Brand guidelines are a comprehensive instructional manual about the brand identity of a business firm or organization for employees.
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