What Are Brand Guidelines And How To Use Them

By Dia Ferguson

Consistency is a key player in building a successful brand because it ensures the organization presents a unified voice to the world.

Brand guidelines, also known as a brand style guide, are used to develop brands because it keeps all marketing collateral consistent. They dictate the structure, design and general feel of a company’s branding and help them become instantly recognizable. These branding rules are used as a reference tool to ensure that a brand will look and feel the same through every part of the company like sales, social media, design, public relations, customer service and marketing.

To keep your brand consistent, check out these important brand guidelines we rounded up below.

1. Define your brand’s mission statement. A mission statement is an extremely important business component on its own, but it also helps keep all released content consistent throughout the brand. Mission statements take time and thoughtfulness to complete because it must show your organization’s values and purpose. Your mission statement should be used to guide your website as well as your blog content, ad copy, social media content and any sort of visual media. It is essentially your company’s voice to the world and you can view an example of ours here.
2. Identify your color palette. Your brand’s color palette influences your logo, website design, advertisements and all-around look. A couple colors should be chosen that will dictate every piece of visual content that your brand creates. After deciding all the colors your brand will use, you should identify each color’s specific RGB and HEX codes. These numbers will ensure that each time a color is used, it is the same shade and hue associated with the brand, so the colors don’t gradually change and become unrecognizable. A brand’s color palette is mainly used by graphic designers, but it still influences all visual content and the general look of a brand.
3. Decide on a specific set of typography. Typography is another important guideline that every company should have in its brand book. The type of font you use is another visual component of your brand and it supports much of the content the public sees from your brand like your logo, website design, blog designs, business cards, taglines to go with your logos and all marketing collateral. Using the same font across all documents sent from your brand can help keep consistency and a unified voice on all levels.
4. Develop image guidelines. Image guidelines should be added as well to your brand’s style guide. Creating an imagery style will help guide all levels of marketing like graphic design, public relations and social media to a consistent branded theme. This can be done through mood boards, which should include examples of the content you want your brand to create. Guidelines for editing content should also be included to ensure all visual aspects are part of a consistent theme.

Brand guidelines help communicate a cohesive theme to every branch of a company, which allows them to hold a consistent and unified look for the public. Constructing a consistent theme for your brand will help it become recognizable to consumers across all spaces.

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Let us help you in creating your brand’s guidelines or if you’re looking at your current guidelines and think they need a revamp, contact us today at info@olivecreativestrategies.com.