What’s Included in a Functional Brand Guide?
If you’ve already read the two blogs published prior to this one on managing a branded social media presence, and why branding is more than just visuals and aesthetics, you might be wondering what components should be included in a brand guide.
The central components that almost any brand will have in the toolkit for creating cohesive yet flexible and responsive branded collateral and presence are pretty consistent regardless of industry. But that doesn’t mean a brand guide will be functional if you just assign whatever aesthetics you think look good.
A functional brand guide is as much a strategic document as an operational one. Without intentional and self-reflexive foundational planning for your brand, you run the risk of creating something that you might love, but falls flat with the people you need to reach.
The best brands feel like an active and welcome conversation with the folks engaging with your product, programs and services: responsive and aware of reception and impact.
The Components of a Brand
In order to work with anyone, in-house or otherwise, it’s a good idea to understand the different parts of a brand your branding documents should have.
These elements are contained in your brand style guide, which acts as your map for building and maintaing your brand across medium, platforms, markets, and stakeholder groups both internal and external. As a resource, you’ll use it when bringing on new team members, creating communications and marketing strategy, or just wanting to double check to make sure the day to day messaging and content you’re creating aligns with the feeling and experience your customers/stakeholders will associate with your brand.
Foundational Brand Style Guide Elements
Brand visual elements. This section would include brand colors, typography, photography and video production and editing guidelines, and rules around where and when to use each of these brand elements.
Brand colors are often broken up into primary, secondary, and tertiary sections, and this section should also include how to use these colors in combination, and rules for good/accessible design like minimum contrast percentages.
Similarly, your typography section will include on-page examples that show how headline, eyebrow, subheadline, and body text should look, including how to use emphasis or color difference to provide emphasis and differentiation.
Brand voice and persona. This section will outline how you want your brand perceived in written and spoken content. It should include variations of your brand voice depending on which stakeholder demographic you’re trying to reach, specific lingo and taglines, and any guardrails for language to avoid.
This section would also include what’s known as an editorial style guide. An editorial guide is a set of rules surrounding writing style, grammar and punctuation, and other niggling details that may seem unnecessary but can add up to having an outsized impact if you’re not mindful of having consistency in your writing.
Logo structure, use, and variations. Maybe you only have the one logo, which means this part of your brand guide would just have that logo, whether or not you’re okay with the logo being printed/displayed in different colors, rules about not editing/skewing the logo to avoid confusion, and the minimum logo size to make sure it’s still legible.
But if you have a logo, a wordmark, a horizontal version, a stacked version, and possibly even sub-brands, this section of your brand guide could be several pages long. If you’re wondering, a logo is the version employing shapes and graphic elements, while a wordmark is your business name written out in a stylized manner.
Other Brand Elements to Consider Including
Structure of digital media and websites. This one is often overlooked but is incredibly important if you’re planning on having a digital-heavy brand communication approach.
Effectively, it’s how to use the brand colors and typography for user experience on your website/app, how to structure a site so the top-level (most important and frequently asked for) information is easily navigated to, and rules around things like use of alt text for accessibility, tag terms to make your site searchable, etc.
Much of what will be included in this section will reference good UX/UI practices.
Print collateral design rules. Will you have business cards? Signage like yard signs, posters, flyers? Are you planning on having letterhead or envelopes you use to send correspondance as your business? Then you should have this section and include a base example, rules for font size and typographic choice, and how to use your brand colors across different designs depending on key uses, size, and where that design will be placed for viewing.
While not a digital product, drawing on best practices for UI and accessible design are great to include here to ensure clarity of your rules, and provide examples of what works and what to avoid.
Press packet. Smaller businesses won’t necessarily need this, but nonprofits and larger companies should have at least a skeleton version ready.
A press or media packet is a short document with approved logo/wordmark, a brief company/organizational bio, any key brand aspects you require be maintained (like the specific business name, rather than a common nickname or shortened version), and contact information for your press representative. It’s there to send to any journalists or news media contacts who reach out with requests for comments, interviews, or to be quoted in a piece they’re working on for broadcast/print.
Else Communications Helps Your Brand Work For You
Hopefully now you have a basic understanding of the different elements that make up a brand guide. While knowing the sections and parts that go into making a brand guide is great, that still leaves the question of what works for your brand.
For instance, with just typography and font families alone, there are thousands of choices. Even if you’re trying to stick to web-safe font families, there are still nearly 20 to choose from. Each with its own history of use that folks often unconsciously associate that font with, design connotations, and more ephemeral things like the feel of a font that impact whether or not it’s a good choice for your brand.
You know what you’re trying to say with your brand, and partnering with a Else Communications to create a brand identity that communicates the message of who your brand is effectively is a great investment. You’ll get a brand guide with all the necessary elements, without having to learn a whole other set of expertise on top of the work you’re already doing to grow your business.
Else Communications 