How to create brand guidelines (and how to implement them)

A strong brand is like a great film character – unique, memorable, recognisable. On screen, that character walks the walk and talks the talk. All. The. Time.

Branding, like a memorable character, must be consistent.

Iconic brands like Adidas, IKEA, Coca Cola remain iconic brands because they implement brand assets with rigour.

Brand guidelines are the tool to do this. But creating a brand guide is time-consuming. It’s more than a set of logo guidelines, it’s the instruction manual for sharing your brand with the world.

Here we’ll take you through how to create a brand guide. We’ll also show you Piktochart’s brand asset tools that implement your branding across visuals with a single click.

Brand guidelines (also called brand standards or a brand identity guide) serve as a rulebook that keeps brand communication coherent across all touchpoints.

The key purpose of a brand guide is to make it easier for people to apply branding consistently. Consistent branding is essential for customers to recognise a brand and respond positively to it.

As a business grows, more people are communicating the brand to others, often across different channels. Good brand identity guidelines are a one-stop-shop for your team to get information on everything to do with your brand. They save time and money by answering common questions and  reducing mistakes and revisions.

Brand guidelines are used by agencies, freelancers, in-house design teams and internal staff. Anyone in an organization can use them to check brand assets are properly applied.

Brand guidelines contain a set of instructions on how to use graphic elements like logos, imagery and color schemes. But more fundamentally, they are a guide to an organisation’s Big Idea – the essence of the brand’s purpose.

Everything in your branding guide should help your team understand what they’re communicating and why.

You can make sure your brand guidelines achieve this by including:

• A brand vision

• A mission statement

• Brand values

This example from beauty brand Glossier has a brand tagline followed by a vision statement. The rest of Glossier’s branding guide aligns to this narrative of simplicity and democratization.

You can think of a brand as a message. The content of the message is the brand’s Big Idea. Branding assets are the language used to convey the message.

That’s why effective brand guidelines start with a company mission statement, outlining the brand’s Big Idea.

Your brand guide lays out different brand assets and explains how to use them. Let’s run through what to include in brand guidelines and look at some examples of good brand kits.

Your brand mark section should show all versions of your logo, including wordmarks, brand marks and color variations. It should also demonstrate good practice on using logos.

Team messaging app Slack has a multi-color logo, but their brand guidelines also show an alternative one-color logo for use on photo and bright color backgrounds.

The color section should list your brand color palette with RGB, CMYK and HEX codes. It should also show best practice for implementing colors.

Are certain colors better for data visualization or attention-grabbing content? Here’s the place to say it.

AI data company Databricks organizes their color palette into sections with instructions on when to use.

Once your brand color palette is in place, you can use it to create all brand visuals. Piktochart’s AI Design Generator is one tool that does this quickly, allowing you to save brand colors and use them to customize templates.

Your typography section lists all your brand fonts. It should explain where to use particular fonts – headings, body text, data presentation and so on.

Accounting software firm Zoho emphasize the readability of their brand font.

The font section can also include information on the use of uppercase and lowercase, as in this example from IKEA:

There’s a risk of brand identity getting confused if the wrong imagery is used in communications. You need to make sure all visuals are consistent with your brand.

Your Imagery section can cover where to source images, guidelines for image content or rules for product photography.
Athleisure retailer Lululemon’s brand guide explains how to show sweat in product photography!

You may also want to include other graphic elements that make it easier for your team to communicate your brand message.

These might include icons, buttons, menu formats, layout instructions, backgrounds or graphic elements like arrows, circles and boxes.

The graphics section might also include guidance on the general feel of graphics, covering accessibility, style and layout.
Trading app Robinhood has a clear brand mission – to make investment more accessible and understandable. Their brand identity guidelines show the manga-inspired images that inspire their graphic style. It’s a narrative, inspirational approach that communicates their vision clearly.

Creating brand guidelines often takes longer than people expect. A lot of thought and detail needs to go into them to make them effective, and often big decisions have to be taken along the way. And even once you’ve decided what to include, laying out your guidelines so they’re clear for users requires planning.
It’s important to start with the Big Idea; what overarching message is your brand communicating? This might also be described as the personality and mission of a brand. For example:

IKEA: with a brand mission to “create a better everyday life for the many people,” IKEA’s instantly recognizable branding is all about using simplicity and clarity to communicate affordable pricing. All IKEA’s brand design elements support this goal.

HEADSPACE: this mediation app bases their brand guidelines on the concept of bringing joy to users. Their brand guidelines are an instruction book on using brand assets to deliver this message.

MATTEL: the toy company are clear about the purpose of their brand guidelines; to create a consistent presence built on the idea of playfulness.

So, what fundamental message is your branding communicating? Here’s a step-by-step guide to the first principles of brand guidelines, so you can make sure you’re starting in the right place.

A brand mission statement is a sentence that sums up what you do and why. Your brand mission informs everything else in your brand guidelines, so it’s best to start here. Everything flows from your mission – tone of voice, color choice, imagery and so on.

But it can take time to get a mission statement right. A well-crafted mission statement does more than just describe what you do. It also incorporates your final goal – the main outcome of what your business does. It might be a solution for a customer, or a feeling someone gets from using your product. It’s the reason you do what you do.

A mission statement is not the same as a tagline or sales pitch. It might not be something that you use in customer-facing marketing at all. It’s an internal tool to help everyone in your organisation understand the purpose they are working towards.

Think of your mission statement as something you might say to a new member of your team to introduce them to what you do, and inspire them about the way you do it.

Have a look at the mission statement from outdoor firepit brand Solo Stove in the example below. Their mission sentence manages to pack in a description of what they do, their design aesthetic, and the emotional outcome for customers.

You can see even from these two pages of Solo Stove’s brand guidelines how their mission informs their choice of logo, imagery and color.

If you already have a company mission statement, consider how branding supports this statement. How does the brand color palette link to it emotionally? Does the logo reflect a key element of the mission? Do imagery and graphics help tell the story of the mission statement?

If these questions are hard to answer, it may be that your mission statement is not clear enough. It might also mean your brand assets have not been chosen with that mission in mind.

Good brand guidelines aren’t just a list of rules and logos. They should help your team understand why those design choices were made, so that they can apply the same principals themselves.

When branding design flows from a Big Idea, it’s much easier to explain the thinking behind a visual identity. Logos,colors and fonts shouldn’t simply be chosen because they look attractive – they should tie in to your overall brand personality.

Your visual identity section can answer questions such as:

• What type of design choices have you made?

• Why have you made them?

• How do your design elements link to / support your brand mission?

AirBnB’s Design Book contains plenty of specific technical information on design elements. But it kicks off with a page explaining how the visual identity of the brand ties in with its mission.

A brand personality is the way your brand comes across to customers. When you meet a person, the way you feel about them is influenced by how they look, how they speak and the colors and styles they’re wearing. Similarly, when we encounter a brand, our reaction to it is influenced by the visuals we see and the words used.

Brand personalities can vary widely. Formal and corporate, irreverent and fun, disruptive and abrasive – the right personality depends on what message a brand wants to get across.

It’s important that the people implementing your branding understand the brand personality. To do this, it’s useful for your brand guide to be written in that personality.

Try thinking of your brand as a person and writing the guidelines in the voice of that person. How does your brand speak? What word choices or sentence structures does it use? Professional, cheeky, market-disrupting, friendly?

Using your brand personality in your branding guide can bring it to life.
This mission statement from Wee Society uses a hint of their brand personality to emphasize their kid-friendly approach to product design.

You can also show your brand personality in the graphics and layout of the brand guide. A brand guide itself should be a good example of how to apply your branding!

Some useful questions:

• How can you use the design of your brand guide to show your brand personality?

• How do you want the internal and external staff using your guide to feel about your brand?

• If a customer read your brand guide, would they recognise your brand from the graphics and layout?

Warren Buffet said that “A brand is a voice and a product is a souvenir.” All brand assets contribute to that overall voice, but the words that a brand uses are key.

Tone of voice is the way a brand sounds when it interacts with customers – the vocabulary it uses, the sentence structures and emotional context. Tone of voice is important in marketing materials, but it’s relevant throughout a business, from staff in call centers to customer bills.

Tone of Voice guidelines can be the hardest part of a brand guide to get right. Making a list of HEX codes for a color palette is straightforward, but explaining how to speak in your brand’s voice is more nebulous.

But tone of voice is a crucial element of a brand guide exactly because it’s easy to get wrong. When the tone of a brand communication is wrong it can undermine trust and authority. 

Internal staff and external agencies may have different writing styles, varying levels of writing expertise and different ideas about how they should communicate. 

Without clear guidance, tone of voice can get messy, and go very wrong.

You’ve probably seen examples of this happening, such as a company having to apologise for a wayward Tweet or off-color customer service reply.

So how do you stop that happening? A tone of voice section in your brand standards is a good start. It can just be a list of dos and don’ts, but it can also be a summary of a brand’s “personality”.

In this example from toy brand LEGO, their brand personality is a LEGO figure, a simple way of communicating tone of voice.

If you’re starting from scratch with a brand tone of voice, think about these questions:

• If your brand was a person, how would they speak?

• What kind of language reflects your brand message? Formal? Irreverent? Chatty? Authoritative?

• What do your competitors say that you either like or don’t like? What makes you different?

• Are there industry buzzwords you use (or don’t use) when talking about your brand?

And if you’re struggling with a Tone of Voice section, remember that you don’t necessarily need wordy explanations here. You just need to capture the essence of the brand tone, however it is best to do that. 

The world’s biggest online chess platform Chess.com just use a handful of adjectives and some well-chosen emojis to demonstrate their friendly, accessible tone of voice, fitting with their mission to make the game of chess friendly and accessible.

Your branding guide will probably never be read by your customers. It’s for your staff, partners or external agencies. But explaining who your customers are in your brand guide helps your team visualize who they’re speaking to when they represent your brand, or produce marketing material.

Branding expert Jennifer Zepeda says, “Ask yourself what are the desires and goals your potential client has that your product or service will allow them to achieve or resolve.” 

Who are your customers? What are they looking for from your brand? What’s important to them?
Wallmart’s brand guide goes into detail about different types of customer, introducing key motivations and shopping habits and giving them a voice.

Use these questions as a starting point for a customer section:

• What problems are your customers trying to solve?

• What do they value in your brand?

• Do you have different groups of customers? What differentiates them? What unites them?

You get a logo made. You pick some random colours you like. You find a nice font and grab some pretty stock imagery. OK, you have some design elements, but you don’t have a brand.

A brand is created when all your design elements and messaging work in harmony to communicate to the outside world what you do and why.

Getting to this point can take time and skill, which is why many brands use designers and brand strategists to do it.

Even if you’re working with a branding expert, you’ll still need to give guidance on what your design elements need to communicate. Some useful questions:

• How does your logo communicate your brand message?

• How should your color choices make your customers or users feel?

• What’s the most important aspect of your font? Readability? Impact?

• How do other graphic elements like icons echo your logo and color palette?

Fintech company Klarna demonstrate how their graphic elements work together in their brand guidelines.

Still got questions? We’ll run through a few of the most common ones that crop up in our experience.

Brand guidelines are a rulebook designed for internal staff and external agencies and freelancers to maintain consistent company branding across all touchpoints.

They explain how design choices communicate the organisation’s mission, and include instructions on the use of brand assets such as logos, colours, tone of voice, imagery and illustrations.

Brand guidelines help you develop and maintain a strong brand that customers will remember and recognise wherever they see it.

You may see these terms used interchangeably, but even though they may cover much of the same ground, brand guidelines and style guides are not the same thing.

The key purpose of a style guide is to ensure visual consistency across all branded materials. It’s aimed at people creating visual content for your brand, usually designers. It will contain logos, color palettes, imagery instructions and other design rules.

A brand guide goes further. It will cover those visual elements, but it will also detail your brand mission, brand personality, tone of voice and even your brand story.

A brand guide is for anyone in your business who communicates what you do to the outside world, whether that’s a design agency, a salesperson, a social media manager or a copywriter.

You can run a business without a brand guidelines document, especially if a business is small. But problems start to arise as a business grows. The more staff you have or the more partners you work with, the more opportunity there is for your brand to be miscommunicated, which can damage your business.

Even if your organisation is small, it’s a good idea to set out brand guidelines now. The sooner you do it, the simpler it is to implement them. Leave it too late, and you’ll be undoing bad work and having to retrain staff. If you put brand guidelines in place early, new joiners learn your brand from the start.

Writing brand guidelines also helps a business crystalise what it does and who it’s for, which is useful for everyone from management to salespeople and marketers.

The primary purpose of brand guidelines is to ensure that your branding is consistent wherever it appears. To achieve that, you should include guidance on using branding in different situations, and provide variations of graphic elements. These might include:

• Logo variations for use on different backgrounds

• Instructions for logo placement on printed material, slides, online

• Instructions for logo use by partners

• Any restrictions on the use of graphic elements such as illustrations

• Examples of branding use on different platforms such as web pages, app or banners

Effective implementation of brand guidelines is also key to ensuring consistency. Consider how you will share guidelines with the people who need them. It’s useful to put in place a process for on-boarding new staff so that they understand branding from the start.

Brand guidelines should be reviewed and updated whenever there is a change to your brand assets, such as a logo update or color palette change.

It’s also a good idea to review when major changes are made to platforms where you interact with customers, such as a website revamp or app update.

But even if you haven’t made major changes, it’s good practice to review brand guidelines at least yearly. Is your company mission statement still accurate? Does your branding still communicate that mission effectively? Reviewing regularly will highlight any adjustments that need to be made. 

Brand guidelines are often created by design agencies as part of developing brand assets such as logos and color schemes. A brand guide will form part of the deliverables from an agency.

But it’s also common to create brand guidelines inhouse, either by an in-house design team or a marketing team. In a smaller business, it might be down to the CEO or a single marketing person.

People who may be involved in creating brand guidelines:

• CEO / upper management for overall brand direction

• Sales team for target audience and customer profiles

• Marketing department for messaging direction

• Designers, in-house or agency

• Copywriters, to contribute to tone-of-voice guidance

Whoever creates the physical brand guide document, that forms only the final part of a long process. The first and most time-consuming step is making decisions about the brand direction. This big-picture process must start with upper management. 

Once the brand mission and personality are set, a marketing department or design agency can develop branding assets.