Useful tips for building a brand’s brandguide

A brand guide user typically hasn’t participated in strategy workshops. They’re unfamiliar with the discussions, tensions, and choices that led to the brand’s creation. Therefore, the opening pages shouldn’t be a manifesto full of general declarations, but a simple explanation of the direction: why the brand exists, who it’s for, what it promises, and how it should be perceived.

It’s worth briefly describing the brand’s purpose and ambition, positioning, key personas, promise, and a few principles that should be visible at every touchpoint. Instead of writing, “we are a bold brand,” demonstrate what boldness means for design, language, photography, product, and customer service. Strategy only becomes effective when it can be applied to the design of a banner, sales slide, or emergency message.

A brand guide isn’t created for the team that created the identity. It’s created for the people who will use it later: designers, marketers, copywriters, product teams, sales, partners, franchisees, local branches, and external agencies. Each of these groups needs something different.

Before designing the guide’s structure, it’s worth asking: who will be using it, what tasks they perform, what they search for most often, where they currently make mistakes, and how much time they have to find the answer. A brand guide doesn’t need to be read from start to finish. It should function like a well-designed website: allowing you to quickly access the information you need.

Therefore, alongside a classic table of contents, it’s worth adding short starting paths: “Are you creating a presentation?” “Are you designing a social media campaign?” “Are you writing a client message?” “Preparing material with a partner?” This is much more useful than a layout composed solely of the names of identity elements.

One of the most important tasks of a brand guide is to show the line between consistency and repetition. A brand needs elements that build recognition. At the same time, it must respond to new channels, formats, markets, and contexts. If all the rules are absolute, the system quickly becomes unwieldy. If everything is allowed, the brand loses its character.

In practice, it’s worth dividing the rules into three groups: foundations, which we don’t change; principles, which can be interpreted depending on the situation; and an experimental space in which the brand can consciously develop. This division helps creators understand not only what they shouldn’t do, but also where they can be creative.

A perfectly designed demonstration poster rarely helps someone who has to create a small advertising banner, newsletter, or slide with a chart. Therefore, examples in a brand guide should be based on the organization’s actual needs.

If the brand communicates primarily digitally, show social media formats, post series, graphic elements for reels, landing pages, display ads, newsletters, presentations, error messages, and notifications. If physical space is important, you’ll need examples of signage, packaging, point-of-sale, employee uniforms, and event materials.

A brand guide should reflect the world in which the brand actually operates, not the world best portrayed in an agency case study.

Prohibitions like “don’t stretch the logo” are necessary, but they’re not enough. Good guidelines teach a way of thinking. They show the correct solution, the incorrect solution, the cause of the error, and a better alternative. This allows the user to not only reproduce the pattern but also understand the system’s intent.

It’s worth adding short comments like “this layout works because it leaves room for a longer headline,” “this color shouldn’t be used on small text,” “in this format, the logo must give way to the message.” These are the little details that make a document an educational tool.

A brand guide is meant to simplify and accelerate work. Therefore, it should lead to libraries of icons, illustrations, components, slides, social media formats, photos, animations, and templates. A board showing a beautiful set of icons alone isn’t enough. You need to describe the logic behind their creation: line thickness, radius, proportions, level of detail, and how metaphors are constructed.

This way, if a new icon is not available, the designer can create one themselves while maintaining the brand’s unique style.

A brand can be recognized not only by its color and logo. It can be recognized by the way it writes instructions, responds to complaints, names new products, or informs users about an error. Therefore, a modern brand guide should also include brand language.

It’s worth defining the characteristics of the brand’s voice, the difference between a steady voice and a variable tone, preferred and discouraged phrases, how to construct headlines, the principles of using humor, inclusive language, communicating in difficult situations, and “before” and “after” examples of the editorial team. Simply stating that the brand is “human, simple, and friendly” won’t change much. Specific statements demonstrating how these characteristics are expressed in practice are needed.

More and more brand interactions are taking place on screens. Brand identity is no longer just a static arrangement of logos, photography, and typography. Brands scroll, react, appear, disappear, transition between screens, and respond to user actions.

Therefore, it’s worth describing how they behave in motion: the pace, rhythm, the way elements enter and exit, the nature of the animation, the behavior of the logo, the movement of the typography, transitions, and the principles of video editing. Not every brand needs an elaborate motion system. For many, a few simple rules that prevent random, inconsistent animations are enough.

Brand consistency shouldn’t mean that some audiences have difficulty reading the message. A brand guide should address the minimum accessibility principles: text and background contrast, legibility of typefaces, text sizes in small formats, safe color combinations, chart design principles, alternatives to color-based messaging, and basic rules for digital materials.

This isn’t just for the UX team. It’s for a brand that wants to be useful, credible, and responsible. A corporate color can be beautiful, but if it doesn’t work in an interface, presentation, or sales material, the system should indicate safe alternatives.

An international brand guide cannot assume that all languages ​​behave the same. Text can be longer or shorter. Other alphabets may require additional typefaces. Direction of writing can change, and tone, jokes, and metaphors may not work outside the market in which they were created.

Therefore, it’s important to define fallback fonts for different alphabets, rules for localizing layouts, a safety margin for longer texts, elements that can be culturally adapted, elements that don’t change, and a consultation process for local materials. The goal is not to create identical communication in every market. The goal is to preserve the same brand character despite cultural differences.

If, after reading the guidelines, a user still has to recreate the layout, search for files, or build a presentation from a blank slide, the guide has only done part of its job. Alongside the guidelines, you should also include current logo files, icon and illustration libraries, document and presentation templates, ready-made social media formats, approved photos, email examples, and working files in the tools the team actually uses.

A brand guide is meant to help, accelerate, and organize work. Only then will the team want to use it, not have to.

A brand evolves with the organization. New products, channels, partnerships, and technologies emerge. Therefore, a brand guide can’t be a closed project. It should have an owner, a version number, a change history, and a simple process for reporting new needs.

Users must know who is responsible for the brand system, where the current version is located, how to report missing issues, who approves deviations, and which files have been retired. The most dangerous brand guide isn’t one with too few pages. It’s one that people no longer trust.

Before launch, it’s worth treating the guide as an internal product and testing it with people who weren’t involved in the rebranding. Ask them to complete specific tasks: finding the right version of the logo, preparing a post, choosing a color scheme, writing a message to a dissatisfied customer. Observe where they get stuck, what they don’t understand, and what information they can’t find. Then, revise the guide before it’s rolled out across the entire organization.

A brand book, color proofs, and a brand guide are all elements of brand codification. They provide the owner with greater confidence that the brand will not lose its consistency over time. But a good brand guide shouldn’t freeze the brand. It should allow it to grow without losing its identity.

The best brand guide is practical, up-to-date, and designed for the people who make decisions on behalf of the brand every day. It’s usually created at the end of a rebrand, but it actually opens the next stage: the moment when the brand ceases to belong solely to the design team and begins to live in the hands of the entire organization.