Craft strong brand guidelines for an iconic visual identity
What makes a brand highly recognizable, distinctive, and iconic? It starts with a consistent identity, personality, and visual strategy. When you’re working with various teams, departments, agencies, and creatives like photographers and designers, how can you keep your branding aligned with a core visual identity?
The answer is great brand guidelines. Your brand’s guidelines ensure that everyone you ever work with is on the same page about how your brand should be visually represented. This saves you time and money — you won’t have to explain your color specifications or typography weight rules each time you work with a designer — so you’ll be able to focus on crafting better brand experiences and growing your audience.
Establishing firm brand guidelines will boost visual recognition for your brand and ensure your packaging stands out on shelves and online — the key to commanding authority in a competitive market.
What are brand guidelines and why are they important?
Highly selling visual identities are all about consistency. Establishing firm guidelines for the consistent representation of your brand is pivotal for a strong brand, and your brand guidelines are the document that achieves that, communicating our brand style specifications so that everyone responsible for bringing your brand to life is on the same page and can work quickly and effectively.
This is why your brand guidelines are one of the most important brand assets you can invest in. Once you create your style guide, it will work as a rulebook for how your brand should be presented to the world across all channels, and your brand’s strategy will come together around these guidelines.
Ultimately, your brand guidelines will determine the presentation of all your collateral, content, packaging, web design and marketing materials. Your marketing and design team will use your brand rules to present a unified brand identity
that shines — and ensures you stand out from your
competition.
What goes into brand guidelines?
Reworking every piece of collateral you create to perfectly align with your brand’s colors and logos is inefficient. Your brand guidelines should cover everything that a designer, brand storyteller, and anyone else you work with can produce new assets without straying from your visual identity.
Don’t leave any of these vital pieces out of your brand guidelines.
Brand story
Every engaging brand is powered by a moving brand story. Don’t leave yours out of your brand guidelines.
Start your brand guidelines off with a mission statement. Your mission statement will guide the rest of your stylistic choices and marketing strategy. The goal of any strong brand is to solve a specific problem for a customer. Let your mission statement guide your brand strategy and brand guidelines.
For example, Nike’s mission statement is to “bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world.” This mission guides all of their product design, marketing campaigns, and the brand experience they curate for the public.
Next, include your vision and values in your brand guidelines. If you haven’t already written your brand vision and values statements, spend time perfecting these. They’ll guide major decisions without your brand, ensure everyone on your team is working towards the same goal, and will determine how your brand communicates with the public. Ultimately, your vision statement is the trajectory your brand is on and how you hope to change the world, and your values are how you’ll get there.
It’s essential that your brand story is well-thought out, easy to understand, and is detailed in your style guidelines so that it can be applied by everyone who works on your brand and understood by the public.
Logo guidelines
Your logo is perhaps the most important visual element of your brand and, when successful, makes your brand instantly recognizable. But your logo won’t command authority and instant recognition if it isn’t consistently applied.
Your guide should include your logo and set clear guidelines for its use. Include acceptable color variations, minimum sizes, and stretching and spacing specifications.
Imagine if you saw Facebook’s logo constantly thrown around in the colors lime green, red, and purple. You’d be unsure of what you were looking at. There’s a reason it’s always blue, and it’s brand recognition. Your brand will accomplish the same by establishing color scheme style rules in your brand guidelines.
Medium’s brand guidelines illustrate clear logo usage guidelines for Medium’s logo. The brand style guide includes all acceptable color variations for the logo, as well as some that should never be used. Medium also specifies how much clearspace should be used around the logo, how the proportions of the logo are (and aren’t) to be changed, and shows examples of some incorrect logo usage. These clear guidelines ensure that their logo is never misused.
Color palette
Your brand’s color palette is one of its most recognizable visual elements and has a huge influence on the emotional experience buyers have of your brand. Because choosing the right brand colors is essential for a consistent brand experience, it’s essential that your style guide sets clear rules for how to use your brand colors.
What’s your brand’s core palette? What secondary colors can be used? Includes HEX codes for colors to ensure that your brand’s visual team can consistently and precisely apply your colors. This will guide all of the visual content your brand creates. Detail all the colors that are acceptable for use in your branding and how they ought to be used across all channels and in collateral and packaging.
Typography
Your brand’s typeface sets the mood for all your brand assets and collateral. Far from being restricted to usage in your logo, your brand’s fonts will be used in packaging, marketing materials, across your site and elsewhere. Your brand guidelines should dictate what to use where.
Work with at least two fonts: a primary font and secondary font. Many brands use a family of fonts for flexibility. You should use typography consistently to create a cohesive brand experience.
NASA style guide’s aesthetically nostalgic brand guide includes rules for the use of typography on important collateral like company vehicles and notepads. Ensuring that every piece of material produced by NASA shares the same logotype and use of fonts is part of what makes all NASA collateral highly recognizable and easily identifiable. It’s important to use typography thoughtfully and consistently, even on documents for internal use.
In your brand guidelines, outline what fonts will be used for what purposes. If you don’t nail your typography, buyers will notice. Your brand will look cheaper if your fonts are off, which will prevent your success.
When starting out, it’s fine to focus on just two fonts that play nicely together and go from there. Detail how different sizes, boldness, and weights will create a design hierarchy in your brand’s visual assets for various headers and subheaders.
Brand voice
Your brand guidelines can be invaluable for ensuring that your brand storytellers and copywriters always nail your brand’s personality. For recognizability, your brand needs to always sound like itself. Set clear guidelines for tone in your brand style guide.
What’s your brand’s personality? Are you witty, pop culture savvy, and relaxed? Offbeat, humorous, and approachable? Highly professional, serious, and helpful beyond belief? What words does your brand always use? What words does it never use?
Shopify’s brand guidelines provide detailed notes on tone, specifying that content should be upfront, honest, clear, and empathetic. They specify that their writers should not use overly complicated or hard to understand language.
Your brand must align with your brand’s mission and target audience. Start small with defining a personality and voice — We use textspeak, We aren’t too serious, We aim to be like our client’s very cool but very honest favorite aunt. Put these personality traits in your brand style guide so that they’ll be applied consistently across marketing channels in the copy on your collateral, site landing, social media, press releases, packaging, and more.
Imagery and Illustration
How does your brand use imagery in its visual strategy? How should your designers use illustrations to complement your most recognizable brand assets, like your logo?
Create style guidelines for the use of imagery, data visualization, photography, and patterns. Give clear examples. Where can illustrations be used? What styles are acceptable?
Starbucks’s style guide sets clear guidelines for how illustrations can be used to align with Starbucks’s visual identity. They dictate that all illustrations should be used in a way that aligns with Starbucks’s brand and legacy and relate back to coffee. They also indicate preference for their brand’s house greens and for texture, photo collage, and unique composition.
Packaging
The details of your packaging are easily one of the most essential parts of a cohesive brand experience, and shouldn’t be neglected when writing your brand guidelines.
All of your brand’s style guidelines will apply to your packaging. Be sure to include and additional style rules that are specific to packaging such as materials that are to be used for packaging sleeves, whether classic or unconventional shapes and styles of packaging will be used, and preferences for matte or gloss lamination.
Conclusion
Don’t send mixed visual messages to buyers. Your brand guidelines will serve as an anchor for your brand’s visual strategy and will be used when designing all of your brand’s assets.
Ultimately, a good brand guideline will ensure your brand communicates itself to the world consistently and precisely, which will lead to a stronger, more iconic brand. Even as your brand goes through visual evolutions, an established and cohesive identity will ensure your brand remains true to its core values and visual personality.
Before you commit, work with ICEY to make your brand’s visual identity shine.
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