How to make Brand Guidelines for Marketing Departments

What are Brand Guidelines?

They are your brand’s visual style guide. Brand guidelines outline the details explaining your brand and how it works.

A typical brand guideline usually includes:

• Cover page
• Colour pallets
• The inspiration behind your logo and brand
• The minimum size of your logo
• Font of logo
• Clear Space
• Incorrect usage
• How it looks like on different imagery/business cards/different products

 

 

Here is a brief example of Mindsparkz’s brand guideline that you can refer to this as a template:

 

A cover page: The cover page should be simple and clean. Including your corporate name and ‘Brand Guideline’ would suffice.

 

Introduction to your brand: Explain to your consumers or employees what your brand is about. What can you offer to consumers? Why should they engage you? This is when you should give an overview of your brand – part of brand identification.

 

Brand Logo: Logos are important and will appear at least 90% of the time. You should explain the inspiration of the logo and why this logo represents your brand. Well-designed logos will upscale your brand and relay to clients that you are professional and reliable.

 

 

 

Colour: List the colours that you use for your logo – Pantone shade, CMYK, etc. These colours should be cohesive with the theme across your entire brand.

 

Inspiration of the logo: The logo is meant to reflect that whatever that comes to mind and thought of were sketched. All products produced here are being sketched by our product designers from scratch before being sent to being manufactured.

 

Minimum Size: There needs to be a minimum size for your brand logo so it will not be printed too small and illegible.

 

 

 

 

Fonts: This will be the font you use across your brand – pamphlets, websites, blogs, etc. This should be uniform to create consistency.

 

Clear Space: Set a minimum clear area on each side of your logo that will be clear of any visuals and texts. This is to ensure distinction and legibility of the brand logo.

 

Incorrect Usage: The logo should be used as it is, no stretching, no cropping, etc. It is common for logos to be distorted when printed wrongly or on a different surface.

 

 

 

 

If you want to have a more detailed brand guideline, brands can also cover the history of the brand, along with the brand vision, brand personality, key values, as well as design and website layouts. Few more materials you can include are brand messages to consumers are brand voice and imagery. These are a few general examples of how a brand guideline would comprise of, however, feel free to add more information!

 

 

Why the need for brand guidelines?

Brand guidelines are easily overlooked. However, they are extremely important for every brand to be able to build a strong brand identity.

 

Brand guidelines establish consistent branding. Some of which includes the colour pallets, fonts, and the tone of voice (such as compassionate, friendly, sincere, knowledgeable), etc. Consistency in branding is critical for corporates. Inconsistent branding comes across to customers that you are not professional and unreliable – which is not a good look. Consumers will then be confused and not trust your brand.

 

Brand guidelines allow you to convey your purpose, brand personality, promises and messages to the people. This displays an image of professionalism, thus creating value because your brand is a cohesive organisation. Not only so, demonstrating consistency helps raise brand recognition and builds brand reputation.

 

Building your brand reputation is a challenging process and it is crucial to have an idea of what represents the brand and yourself. This way, people can easily spot you when they see your products in public. For example, consumers can simply identify us because of the classic blue that we used throughout our branding and designing.

 

Lastly, employees come and go. It is impossible to expect them to know everything about your brand. This brand guideline will be extremely useful in educating them. That way, you can assure that even without the marketing manager, employees are still able to use the correct logo size, correct colour, correct font, etc.

 

 

Mindsparkz:

Want to create your very own brand guidelines and website layout but do not have an in-house designing team? Mindsparkz will be perfect for you! Our designing team offer professional design and creative services, perfectly competent to cater to your needs. The dedicated designers here will be able to assist your company gain a competitive edge. Feel free to contact us today for more enquiries.