What are the essentials?
Brand guidelines are a set of tools designed to give your brand consistency and flexibility, it can be used as a resource that everyone in the company or your partner network can use to understand how to represent or share your brand.
Although each company is different, there are some basic items which can be called basic elements of the brand guidelines:
- Brand purpose
- Brand identity (logo, logo variations variations and usage)
- Colours
- Typography
- Supporting elements (patterns, icons)
Strategic elements
Depending on the purpose of the guidelines, sometimes strategic elements are added to the document as well. This is needed when the variety of users is wider, for example presenting your brand as a franchise.
- Brand values
- Brand story
- Brand strategy
- Competitors and audiences
- Brand mission
- Brand positioning
- Tone of voice
- Brand imagery
- Clothing
- etc.
Your brand guidelines are a document that anyone could pick up, look through, and fully understand everything there is to know about your brand and business.
Is there any difference?
The terms brand book, brand manual, and brand guidelines are all often used interchangeably. It’s typically just a matter of preference or geographical location.
We’ve noticed a lot of our clients across Europe refer to brand guidelines, although brand book seems to be the most common term. Across the pond in the USA, creating a brand manual is often what our clients talk about. Each term means the same thing.
A brand guideline, brand book, or brand manual is a document that summarises your brand. From brand strategy through to brand identity and execution.
The focus
Brand identity focuses on how to create added value for your brand. This will help potential clients to recognise your company.
A possible target to aim is finding the key element of your brand that might click with a potential customer. In most cases it is still a logo, but evermore a full brand concept is important in representing the brand in the best possible way.
So, in a process of creating the identity, we will help define:
- Brand identity (logo, logo variations variations and usage)
- Colours
- Typography
- Supporting elements (patterns, icons)
The process
We offer presentations and courses as a subscription service, e.g. 1-2 times per year, as your company grows and new colleagues need to learn about the values and usage of the brand.
- Background and values – Client side brief or we do the background mapping.
- Brainstorming and mood-board to find client expectations for the visual outcome.
- Visual appearance of the identity (one version per brief)
- Guidelines
- Presentation or course to staff members
- Exports and implementations
Focus on the basics
A brand strategy includes many factors of business management, so the basic strategy is usually created by the company owners. Even as the company is young, the basic steps are usually in place, but not necessarily written down or thoroughly analysed.
The next steps
Whule creating a strategy we mainly focus on:
- Brand values
- Brand story
- Naming
- Competitors and audiences
- Brand mission
- Brand positioning
- Tone of voice
- Etc.
