As your small business expands in size, so do the prospects for new customers to find you. Every interaction individuals must have with your company be consistent, from accepting your business card at an event to browsing your website for further information.
Because your brand is more than just a logo and a colour palette.
It’s the experience customers anticipate from your company and the words they use to refer you to others.
What are brand guidelines, exactly?
Your brand guidelines ensure that your print and digital marketing are consistent and appropriately represent your company. It’s also logical from a business standpoint.
Detailed brand standards also assist you in teaching new employees how to speak about the company, its products, and services.
This article will teach you the following:
- What should your brand guidelines include?
- How to create a unified appearance and feel for your company
- Why it’s critical to maintain a consistent image no matter where people find you—online or offline
1. Begin with “why.” Your brand mission or vision statement is an action-oriented explanation of how your company serves its customers.
Your brand mission, on the other hand, goes beyond articulating what you do to share the reason for your job and the impact you want to make on the world. It explains what you do for others and how you go about achieving the objectives you’ve set for yourself and your company.
Your mission statement should be included in your brand standards because it:
- Determine the type of customers you’re attempting to attract
- Set the tone for your brand’s presentation
- Describe what you and your company stand for.
The following stages use a fake adventure tours firm called Chaz’ Fake Adventures to demonstrate what a Brand guide looks like.
The brand mission of Chaz’ Fake Adventures may be described as Adventure trips that assist local communities.
2. Identify your unique selling proposition.
You may have found your unique selling proposition when creating your mission statement (USP). Chaz’ Fake Adventures: Create chances for local communities via low-impact adventure tours Chaz’ Fake Adventures’s USP may be: Chaz’ Fake Adventures: Create possibilities for local communities through low-impact adventure tours
This is another aspect of your brand that should be included in your rules. Your USP talks directly to your target market — in their own words, about their issues, beliefs, and worries. As a result, consistently integrating your USP across print and digital builds credibility and ingrains your brand in the minds of your audience. Branding is all about awareness, and your unique selling proposition (USP) is a significant element of persuading consumers to select you over your competition.
While your brand’s goal, values, and unique selling proposition (USP) aren’t necessarily tangible marketing assets, they are at the heart of every encounter with your company. They set the tone, appearance, channel, and platform for any comprehensive brand style guide, thus they’re a must-have.
3. Define how to utilise your logo.
Your logo is a visual representation of your company that allows people to quickly recognise it. It’s a good idea to include your logo, as well as a description of what it signifies. Explanations are always beneficial when it comes to brand standards, which are supposed to be an instructive and actionable resource for your internal and external partners. When it comes to your brand, leave no space for interpretation; this isn’t the location where you want individuals to be able to express themselves freely.
Your brand rules should go beyond the meaning of your emblem to specify which uses are permitted and which are not. Specific dimension ratios, colour inversions, and black-and-white-only logo specifications, for example, will help maintain uniformity across your marketing materials. Feel free to include as many logo variations as you’d like in your style guide. This is your catch-all, so go as big or as small as you want.
In brief, the logo page makes it simple for everyone to understand how to utilise the logo in a way that is consistent with the brand. It’s a straightforward design with a lot of content.
Your brand will now remain intact regardless of whether your logo appears on a folded booklet, branded clothes, or a social media profile page, thanks to the boundaries explicitly established in your rules.
4. Outside of your logo, you’ll want to define (preferably one to three) colours for your colour palette.
Include the colour names (if available), a colour swatch, and hex codes for those colours in your brand style guide (the HTML version of colour names).
Using the same colours throughout your marketing materials, signs, website, and social media profiles is essential for developing a recognised and identifiable brand, just as it is with your logo. There’s less space for errors when you have your approved colours and necessary information in your guidelines.
The colour palette of Chaz’ Fake Adventures is inspired by nature. Sky blue, dark sky blue, and lime green evoke visions of adventure in other lands.
That isn’t all, though.
Green is widely utilised to communicate nature and environmental responsibility, while blue is often associated with expertise and reliability.
It takes time to select the perfect colour scheme, so do some study on common colour connections while you’re at it. Use your guideline as a home for your colour palette once you’ve whittled them down. Having your unique colours in one spot will save you time in the long run, and your online and physical brand presence will be consistent.
5. Choose a beautiful typography.
To create a trustworthy and consistent brand, you must utilise the same fonts as your brand colours. You chose one or two typefaces that felt perfect for your brand while building your business card or website; these are your authorised fonts.
Don’t worry if you can’t recall the font names. Look up the names of your primary and secondary typefaces in your website builder or marketing material design project.
Add their names and preferred font sizes to your guide after you get them. Showing examples of type cases is critical because it avoids ambiguity and, once again, limits the scope of interpretation.
The font names, styles, and use cases (title and body text) are all noted and easy to reference in the Chaz’ Fake Adventures example. This is a simple yet powerful approach to display your favourite typeface clearly and understandably.
6. Select appropriate visuals
An effective technique to express what your firm does is to include a set of authorised images (ideally original photographs) and themes that fit inside your brand. Outlining acceptable specialist sectors also aids image selection in the future, ensuring brand consistency.
Your inspiration pages are useful because they provide quick references to the brand’s visual identity. When briefing a writer or designer on your brand style or onboarding a new member of staff, these facts come in handy.
And the adjectives you want people to use when talking about your company are set by your brand terms.
7. Establish your tone of speaking
The personality of a brand is defined by its voice, which is frequently described using adjectives.
The emotional character of the voice is referred to as tone. It’s the way a brand “speaks” differently based on the audience, situation, or topic matter.
Your brand has a consistent voice, but the tone varies based on the situation.
Your writing will be more consistent if you use your own voice, and it will be more emphatic if you use tone.
Chaz’ Fake Adventures self-describes as:
- Athletic
- Enthusiastic
- Contemporary
Because Chaz’ Fake Adventures’s audience is made up of active adventurers, the voice should reflect this and be full of energy and passion. People who browse the website should have the same amount of energy as people who are going on a guided mountain hike.
While your company’s voice isn’t a physical object like a logo, it’s nevertheless an important aspect of your brand identity. From flyers to your Facebook page, your brand language should be consistent throughout all interactions with your company.
Give as many instructions as possible so that the voice of your company is constant regardless of who is writing for you.
8. Describe your writing style in detail
Is it better to use ALL CAPS or a sentence case?
The tone of your message is influenced by the manner you write. Languages are adaptable, and there are numerous ways to convey the same meaning with the same words.
Consider the following message:
- For a quote, please contact us.
- FOR A QUOTE, CONTACT US.
Isn’t it true that they have a different vibe?
The capitalised (or all caps) form appears to be much more serious. It nearly sounds like someone is yelling. The first example is written in a sentence case with no punctuation at the end. It makes the message appear less like instruction and more conversational.
Having said that, there are times when using all caps is appropriate.
The firm name of Chaz’ Fake Adventures, for example, is written in capital letters. This makes sense because it’s an enthusiastic outdoor tours firm, and the capitalisation expresses the brand’s enthusiasm. The capital M even refers to the mountain peaks included in some of the brand guide’s visuals.
Defining your writing style will help you maintain consistency in all of your written communications.
9. Make use of online resources.
Google Slides is great for establishing a dynamic brand guide, as it can be updated and shared via email regularly. Its easy-to-follow approach makes getting amazing outcomes a breeze. It’s also completely free.
We’d be interested in hearing how your brand guide came out. Use the hashtag #PrintHive to share your photos.




