What to include in your brand guidelines

If you've spent your time developing the right branding for your organisation, then it makes sense to ensure that you have a clear set of brand guidelines in order to keep future graphic design 'on brand' and consistent. This will benefit every piece of marketing activity - helping to define web design layouts, social media accounts and digital marketing campaigns, as well as traditional print marketing.

So what should be in your brand guidelines?
These are the main areas that your graphic designer and marketing communications lead will need to cover as the guide is developed:

1. Details of your brand's vision, key values, history and any personality traits. This will help greatly with the creation of content.
2. The brand mission statement, with examples of the accompanying tone of voice. This section will be of great help to any future copywriters working on your account.
3. Details of your logo and the rules of how it can be used - for example, minimum sizes, rules for whiteout and mono versions, spacing guidelines and adjustments that cannot be made to it. The logo should be placed in example materials to provide context and explanation.
4. Colour palette which defines brand colours for primary and secondary elements and RGB / CMYK codes.
5. Details of any supporting design elements which can be used alongside the brand for specific campaigns.
6. Details of the type of photography that should be used, including where the photography can be sourced from, example stills of the brand's photography in action and details of image repositories etc.
7. Typography information for the font family and alternatives for online use where appropriate.
8. Example designs for corporate essentials such as letterheads and business cards to show how the logo and typeface works in practice.

I have followed these brand guidelines. What else can I do?
This will generally be enough to get a business started with new brand guidelines which can be further developed and refined over time. Valuable extras to consider include website and social media grid styles, promotional material design such as leaflets and posters, signage design and other materials. Include information about where these materials can be ordered or accessed if the plan is to reorder existing designs rather than start from scratch each time.

Continually follow your brand guidelines
Use these guidelines or 'rules' consistently and your brand will become much stronger as a result. Contact LS25 Web Design today for more branding and graphic design advice.