Avoid Losing Time & Money on Brand Inconsistencies

Have you ever started working with a partner to do an event or maybe an agency to do some advertising for you, only to find that they used the wrong logo in the marketing materials? Or maybe it was the right logo, but it was all fuzzy and pixelated?

Have you ever hired a company (or a person) to build you a website or launch your social platforms only to find that they used three different fonts, colours that are like yours, but not exactly yours, and stock images that don’t quite match your target audience?

How infuriating right?! How could they not know that it looked bad?!

Well, it might not be ALL their fault. Stay with me on this one...It’s a little bit their fault and possibly a little bit of yours too.

Brand Guidelines are something many businesses don’t have or don’t even know how beneficial they can be. When working with others/partners/clients, on-boarding new team members, or doing some marketing, Brand Guidelines can save you tons of time and resources. And it’s a simple PDF - nothing fancy.

Have I lost you yet? Do you know what Brand Guidelines even are?

Let me explain.

Brand Guidelines are a document that compiles all the “rules” about your brand into one concise place that is easy to digest, pull information from, and most of all gives the reader a sense of who or what your brand represents or stands for. Brand Guidelines can also be known as Brand Standards, which essentially means the same thing -- what you can and can’t do with your brand and likeness. A great example of a well-known brand that just launched a whole new brand with Brand Guidelines is MailChimp. You can access an example of Brand Guidelines here. Their standards may be a little more in depth than yours will be, but it will give you a great idea on how to start.

Brand Guidelines are usually broken down into four sections:

1. Logo

2. Use/Misuse

3. Typography

4. Colour Palette

Sometimes Brand Guidelines will also include images or likeness that you may use in certain situations. For example, whether or not there should be people in your images or illustrations or colour vs. black and white.

Here’s how to build a Brand Guidelines document (or have a designer do it for you). I’ll use some examples of iconic brands and their guidelines documents throughout to help illustrate the options.

LOGO

Include the logo you would prefer people use all the time. It may be vertical or horizontal or you may be happy to use both when it suits. If you are picky about how your logo should look, then include parameters about when to use the vertical vs. the horizontal.

Also, include your mark if you have a “simple logo” that you use for things like favicons (website tab image) or stamps, etc. Add the parameters for when it is okay to use this logo/mark. You may also want to include what the spacing should be around each of your logos, so as not to crowd or confuse your logo with anyone else's.

USE/MISUSE

It’s your brand and your responsibility to make sure people are using it correctly. This will allow your brand to be recognizable anywhere, any time. Because it’s your brand, you get to decide how you want people to use it or not use it.

Here are two good examples of when to use what logo or when to use certain colours of the logo from Spotify, as well as what not to do (misuse) of the Twitter logo.

TYPOGRAPHY

Typography or Typeface refers to the font or fonts that are acceptable to use with your brand. This is especially important to keep in mind if you are building documents that will be distributed to many people or building a website with multiple pages that more than one person might be working on. See Twitter's example of the font that they use for their tweets.

COLOUR

There are so many shades and variations of colours it is a good idea to capture the exact colours you want to use for your brand and communicate them as hex codes or other colour identifiers. It’s not enough anymore to just say, our colours are blue and yellow. You need to identify which blue and which yellow you would like to see. Typically a brand would have one or two main colours with a palette of secondary colours that are fine to use in conjunction with the brand. Here is another example from MailChimp.

If you want your Brand Guidelines or Brand Standards to give your partners or your new hires even more information about your brand (especially helpful if you aren’t an iconic brand like Google, Twitter, MailChimp, Spotify, etc), you may also want to include things like your values and mission or rules for photos and video. Something like Slack’s guidelines here. Slack’s guidelines are pretty intense though, so don’t let that 50-page document scare you into not creating Brand Guidelines for your business. It doesn’t need to be that difficult!

Brand Guidelines are extremely important to your business. The consistency in your brand across platforms, websites, marketing materials, etc. will drive positive brand awareness, will help people remember your brand over time, and will undoubtedly onboard new hires, partners, and consultants quickly, easily, and consistently. No more weird logos, mismatched colours, or black logos on dark purple shirts.

A Brand Guidelines document will save you time and money - so you aren’t reviewing the wrong creative time and time again, you won’t have to train and then correct new hire’s work multiple times, and instead of sending tons of approved files to a partner, you just send one Brand Guidelines PDF one time. Letting you breathe easy and get back to working in your business and not on your business.