If you’ve spent any length of time trying to build a brand, you’ll agree that it’s no cakewalk; not that you expect it to be, what with great things not coming easy and all.
Over the course of the journey, you’ll find out that the main brand objectives are to maintain quality and consistency. This applies to whether you’re starting out afresh, scaling the brand, or launching a rebrand.
As you manage resources and operations internally and delegate to freelancers, even the slightest lapse in focus on these objectives could cause a setback. It might start with a little mismatched colors here, incorrect fonts there, only to snowball into a disjointed brand image. This might leave you running a real risk of losing valuable clients in the long run.
The solution? Figure out how to develop brand guidelines and stick to them to ensure a cohesive identity across all touchpoints. In this piece, we’ll explain how brand guidelines can help you maintain consistency across different digital platforms, and the best ways you can get started.
Fundamentals of Developing Brand Guidelines
Brand guidelines are nice to have if you care about brand consistency – and you should. However, it isn’t a silver bullet to your branding challenges. It’s best to see it as a means to an end, not the end.
Let us break it down:
Every brand has its unique challenges: some might be trying to better understand their audiences, while others are looking to fix their communication strategy. A guideline won’t suddenly make you communicate better or get more insights. You’ll still need to work on those more specifically.
What a guideline can give you, though, is a chance to start tackling those issues with the best foot forward. It brings calm and consistency to the chaos of branding ideas you might have already been trying.
By learning how to develop brand guidelines, you get to maintain uniform brand elements (such as logos, color schemes, and tone of voice) across all digital and physical platforms. This gives you a real chance at strengthening brand recognition. This was what enabled Burger King to nail a particularly important rebrand, and also explains why Coca-Cola and the color Red are inseparable.
But in a competitive digital space such as it is today, it’s crucial that your brand starts with the foundations of a bespoke guideline. Branding as a whole doesn’t have a one-size-fits-all approach, and neither should your guidelines. If they’re adaptable, brand guidelines can give your brand extra competitive edge.
Here’s an idea for you: if you tailored your brand guidelines slightly for different platforms (e.g., tweaking visuals for different social media platforms), you get to see if your brand’s user experience and reach improves without diluting the overall identity.
You get to experiment, mix and match to find the perfect formula on how to get interaction and engagement in diverse environments.
Elements of A Brand Guideline
What should your brand guidelines contain? No matter what digital services your brand offers, it needs to include some fundamental elements. They are:
Brand Core
Your brand core serves as the foundational driving force behind all aspects of your brand operations. Think communications, website design; brand core shapes everything about the business. The brand core is made up of key elements that define who you are and why you matter, including:
- Brand Purpose: The reason your brand exists and the impact you aim to make with it.
- Brand Vision: The future you imagine and aspire to create; how your brand plays a role in achieving it.
- Brand Mission: The specific goals your brand is working toward and how you plan to accomplish them.
- Brand Values: The principles and beliefs that guide your decisions, actions, and behaviors.
Written Identity
Often mistaken for brand voice, your written identity is the way you communicate your brand through all forms of written content online. Whether it’s product descriptions, email newsletters, or customer interactions, your written identity defines how your brand is expressed in language. It includes:
- Brand Writing Voice: The unique style in which your brand communicates.
- Brand Writing Tone: The emotional quality or attitude your writing conveys.
- Brand Writing Personality: The character or persona your writing embodies.
- Brand Tagline: A concise, memorable phrase that encapsulates your brand’s essence.
- Brand Value Proposition: A clear statement of the unique benefits your brand offers.
- Brand Messaging Pillars and Differentiators: The key themes and attributes that set your brand apart.
Visual Identity
Your visual identity is everything your customer interacts with visually. From the first glance at your social media profile picture to the experience of navigating your website or physical storefront, your visual identity shapes every visual touchpoint. It includes, at a minimum:
- Logo
- Colors
- Typography
- Photography
- Wayfinding (signs and navigation systems)
- Paint Colors and Visual Hierarchy
- Iconography
- Data Visualization
Note: If you’re just starting out, you may not have a fully developed brand identity yet. However, it’s essential to have the basics in place—such as your logo, color palette, typography, and guidelines for brand voice and personality.
How to Develop Brand Guidelines
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Assets and Standard Gathering
Brand assets include everything from your guidelines on tone, style, and messaging to visual elements like colors, fonts, and imagery, along with how to effectively combine them. Remember, it’s not just about the individual elements – how you blend them is key. Just like flour, eggs, and sugar can be used to make either bread or cookies, the way you assemble your brand assets defines the final result.
If you’re working with a professional agency on your brand identity development, these documents and assets will be created during the process. If not, you may need to dig through your archives to find these critical files and any guidelines that have been documented – if they exist beforehand.
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Picking a Format
There are several ways to distribute your brand guidelines, each with its own advantages and drawbacks. Let’s explore a few options:
Printed Brand Guides
The traditional approach to brand guidelines is a printed document. Before digital tools became prevalent, a physical brand guide was essential. Even today, printed guides can elevate the perceived value of a brand and reinforce the longevity of its standards.
For one thing, physical copies are easy to reference and can symbolize the importance of consistency in branding. They’re tangible and can sit on desks for immediate access. However, printing can be costly, and updates require reprinting, making this method less flexible than digital alternatives.
Digital Brand Guide
A digital version, typically in PDF format, offers a more flexible option. While still static, digital files can be distributed quickly and more cost-effectively than printed versions.
Digital brand guides are easier and cheaper to update than printed guides. Digital files are also portable, making them accessible on any device. However, version control can be a challenge. If multiple versions of the guide are circulating, there’s a risk that employees or freelancers may rely on outdated guidelines, leading to branding errors.
Website Brand Guide
As your business operations grow, it becomes expedient that you learn how to develop brand guidelines on a dedicated website or subdomain becomes a practical solution. Interactive brand guides are easy to update in real-time and share via a simple link, ensuring everyone always has access to the latest version.
You can publish new guidelines with a click, and everyone with the link has the most current version. It’s noteworthy that maintaining a website requires ongoing costs. Security is another concern – without password protection, anyone could potentially access your brand assets and misuse them.
Workspace Brand Guidelines
These days, many companies now prefer to integrate brand guidelines directly into their existing workspaces. Tools like Notion are ideal for this purpose. Notion allows users to host documents, embed media, and link to external resources, making it an all-in-one platform for organizing and accessing brand guidelines.
Workspace brand guidelines seamlessly fit into your team’s workflow. If you’re already using Notion or a similar platform, embedding your brand guidelines there makes them easily accessible and encourages frequent use.
However, effectiveness depends on how organized your workspace is. Integrating guidelines with tools like Google Drive can help, but it requires careful setup to avoid disorganization.
Guideline Building
Once you’ve decided on the format for your brand guidelines and gathered all the necessary components, it’s time to assemble them. Based on our experience, brand guidelines are more effective when they also include these additional sections:
- Dos and Don’ts
It’s just as important to show what not to do with your brand assets as it is to explain the correct usage. Common mistakes, like stretching the logo, using the wrong colors, rotating images, or adding unauthorized effects (like drop shadows), can harm brand consistency.
Why is it Important? By providing clear examples of dos and don’ts, you’ll be helping users avoid missteps and ensure they use brand elements correctly.
- Checklists
As you develop and apply your brand identity, you’ll find processes that ensure consistency and streamline workflows. Turning these into checklists simplifies implementation and makes sure nothing gets overlooked. Examples of checklists include:
- Steps for writing blog articles.
- Guidelines for creating images or graphics.
- Video editing procedures.
- Audio optimization steps.
- SEO best practices for publishing website content.
These are crucial steps because, by including checklists in your brand guidelines, you’re encouraging regular reference and builds consistency across tasks. This transforms the guidelines into a living document, making it an essential resource for the entire team.
Guideline Testing
As the creator of your brand guidelines, it’s easy to assume they make perfect sense – why not? you’re already familiar with the details and know how to implement them.
However, that perspective isn’t always helpful. To ensure your guidelines are clear and effective, give them to someone else and ask them to create something that aligns with your brand. This will quickly reveal any gaps or ambiguities in your guidelines.
Testing them with fresh eyes is the best way to identify areas that need improvement.
Guideline Accessibility
Lastly, ensure your brand guidelines are easily accessible. Store the document in a location that’s regularly used, not somewhere it will be forgotten. It should be a resource that you and your team frequently refer to in order to keep the brand consistent and top of mind. Regular access reinforces the importance of following the guidelines in day-to-day operations.
Wrapping Up
Developing a comprehensive brand guideline is an investment that yields substantial returns, if you’re a business aiming to establish a strong and consistent brand presence.
Remember, brand guidelines are not merely a static document but a dynamic tool that empowers your team to consistently deliver on your brand promise, fostering a strong and lasting connection with your audience.
If you’re embarking on this journey for the first time, remember to start by understanding the fundamentals. Define your brand’s core essence, establish a clear visual identity, and articulate your brand voice.
As your brand evolves, so too should your guidelines. Regularly review and update them to reflect your growth and ensure they remain relevant in your sector.