Before we get into the details, let us know what a Brand guide is
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When you decide to build an extraordinary brand, you have to be consistent. And a consistent brand starts it, creating a brand style guide book. A brand book also refers to a Brand guide is a brand bible that corporates official documents that explain the brand’s identity and existing brand standards.
This brand guide helps managers, graphic designers, marketers, developers, sales, and even packaging departments be concordant and present an amalgamated vision of the brand to the public and help all departments communicate consistent messaging. In other terms, it’s a reference tool to maintain the consistency of how the brand’s overall experience feels like.
Hence what aspects to be added that assess your company is the principal thing.
The brand book consists of,
- Logos & taglines
- Color palette
- Appealed typography
- Conveying tone
- Pictures and info graphics
Why are Brand guidelines important?
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Brand identity is your company’s personality of how the world will see you. This is something that you can’t keep on changing as inconsistency will confuse and alienate your audience. The brand guidelines will help maintain a rhythm of rules that has to be followed by marketers and designers.
This will help create your brand’s unique personality, maintain the brand’s believability, and stand out from competitors.
A brand guide will help the new employees know the rules and act as an employee orientation to be aware of the visual elements’ consistency.
For example, if you are hiring a freelancer, a brand book will help be a great help to the person as all he has to do is open the book and see all the things to know in just a few seconds, hence working on the brand guidelines. This will make their work easier and help to maintain consistency as well as save time.
What to take care of before creating a brand book?
The brand guide consists of a set of rules; hence it should have a balanced guideline. You don’t have to be stern to obstruct inventiveness, but you can’t let them do it on your own.
The brand identity book should be team effort such that every person from a different field is to be involved up to some extent. Though the authority should remain to the one who can help shape the brand’s identity, everyone should be the part of it; hence they become aware and respect the guidebook.
The brand style guide’s length depends on the company. They can make it a single page to ten pages, and it depends on the company’s compound structure.
Overall, your brand guide should belong as necessary, separating and clearly stating guidelines useful to communicate efficiently.
The critical elements of the Corporate identity manual
This part consists of an introduction to your brands’ story and how its visual identity has evolved. This will help you to keep track of the company and where it is going to guide the current and new employees.
Mission & Vision
The mission statement includes why your company exists, and the vision statement is about where you want your brand to go. This should be true to your brand.
When you are crafting your brand mission, focus on your company’s purpose, existence reason, and striving to make the world. This will help to create strong brand differentiation with consumer’s engagement.
A strong vision statement will be a leading force for all your business decisions. Ask yourself:
- How much growth do you want in your company?
- Do you want to go into multiple ranges of services?
- What kind of request do you want your business to have?
Combinedly, Mission, and Vision is a valuable tool that will make a path to create a strategic business decision to shape your brand.
Chosen audience
Focus on your targeted audience and how your product or services will solve their problems. Do research the market and include insights such as their needs, wants, and values that can help you understand your audience more effectively, and you can communicate to your team the same.
This will also help you understand your audience’s focus and to tailor that need too.
Brand personality
Establishing a brand persona is the main element in setting your brand’s consistency across all communication channels. Make a list of all the adjectives that can help describe your brand. Don’t convey mixed messages as it will be difficult for your customer to connect with your brand; instead, ask yourself how your brand should be? Do you want it to be like “cut to the chase” Or witty and playful?
It is best to try to add the collection of traits of your brand persona into a statement that guides our overall messaging.
Values
Every company guiding principal varies, and it determines the decision and actions. These values will be easy for the team as well as a new person joining to stay on-brand.
How to create a visual guideline of a brand book?
Logo brand guidelines & taglines
We all want our logo to be distinctive and identifiable, but we have to ensure that it remains optimized with everything. The most brand has variation in its logo to keep it in various places.
Thus, to avoid confusion, it is necessary to include information regarding the size, color, and format of all the logo variations. Besides these, some companies add taglines to convey their brand message to the audience at various events. Hence brand books will help to communicate when and how slogans should be used.
Also read: The World’s Most Famous Logos
Color palette
Every brand has a color palette that gives a look and feel of consistency. For example, Skype is associated with blue, Apple with black/grey, and so on. Thus your color will define your brand and help customers to identify you.
Appealed Typography
Every brand has its style of fonts for both print & Digital media. Brand books will dictate the fonts’ example, size, use of color, and explain when and how to use them.
Conveying tone
Your message on communication channels- emails, social media, press releases, blog posts, and ads, etc. should have a consistent tone of voice. Your business guidelines and the message you convey should be aligned with each other. Take care of the language use and try to fit it in your brand persona for your target audience.
Pictures and Infographics
This states the type of design that can be used in the guidebook. What kind of photos, graphics to be used, and how images will be edited and what color to use, which design elements can be put in this section? Collect inspiration from successful brands, particularly those that have similarities with your brand.
Great style guide examples
Although there are many fantastic brand books available out there and each one of them is unique in style and purpose, here is the list of most creative brand books we have come across.
- Download Skype Brand Guidebook
- Download Spotify Brand Guidebook
- Download Cisco Brand Guidebook
- Download Netflix Brand Guidebook
- Download NASA Brand Guidebook
- Download Coca Cola Brand Guidebook
- Download Google Brand Guidebook
Key Takeaway
An artistically crafted brand book will bring business alignment, cohesion, and consistency. Try to make your brand guide with in-depth information and cover all bases to make sure it is easy to communicate. This will provide a framework to work with while giving them the freedom to do what is best.
