Brand guidelines: what goes in, and how to write them

Almost every company that has paid for an identity has a forty-page PDF somewhere that nobody has opened since delivery. And almost every one of them also has a folder with eleven versions of the logo, three blues all claiming to be the same colour, and a printed leaflet set in a typeface nobody can find any more.

The two facts are connected. The document was never opened because it was written to impress in a presentation, not to be used at 5pm by a contractor who needs the logo for a banner.

Who actually reads it

Four people, with completely different needs. The structure should serve all four, in the order they turn up:

• The contractor in a hurry. Wants the right file in thirty seconds. Needs downloads, not theory.
• The new designer. Wants the logic, so they can make something the document does not cover.
• The printer. Wants CMYK, Pantone, minimum sizes and the vector file.
• The person writing. Wants tone of voice and examples, not colours.

The structure: eleven chapters

1. Brand essence

One page, not ten: positioning, promise, personality and tone of voice, exactly as decided in the brand strategy. It comes first because the rest of the document is a consequence of it, a designer who understands the positioning will make good decisions in situations the guidelines never anticipated.

2. The logo: construction and variants

The primary mark and every variant delivered, each with the situation it is used in: horizontal, vertical, isolated symbol, monochrome, inverted. Each shown as an image, not just named as a filename.

3. Clear space and minimum size

Clear space is always expressed relative to a part of the mark (usually the height of a letter or the width of the symbol) so that it works at any scale. A value in millimetres is wrong the moment the logo changes size.

Minimum size is given separately for screen (in pixels) and for print (in millimetres), because the limit comes from different things: pixels on screen, ink spread on paper.

4. Misuse

The most-read chapter in the entire document, because it is the only one that is understood at a glance. Six to eight examples, each with a screenshot struck through in red: not stretched, not rotated, not recoloured, no drop shadow, not placed on insufficient contrast, the name not re-set in another typeface.

5. Colour palette

Every colour with all its codes: HEX for the web, RGB, CMYK for print, Pantone if one exists, plus the internal name. And, critically, the proportions: how much of a typical material each colour covers. A palette without proportions is a list of colours, not a system, see the palette guide.

Add the permitted contrast pairs: which text on which background. One page there prevents most accessibility problems.

6. Typography

The families, the permitted weights, the full scale with sizes and line heights, and the fallbacks for situations where the licence does not apply, an email, a Word document, a partner's website. See the typography guide.

7. Grid and spacing

The spacing unit, the grid, the margins. Short, but present: without it every new material reinvents its own distances.

8. Image style

The photography or illustration rules, written as checkable instructions, plus six correct examples and three wrong ones. The wrong ones do more work than the text.

9. Applications

The system applied to the things you actually produce: a post, an email signature, an invoice, packaging, signage, a deck. Guidelines full of invented applications (a billboard for a company that has never bought one) look impressive and help nobody.

10. Writing

The “we write / we do not write” table, punctuation and formatting rules (how prices, dates and phone numbers are set), banned words, and the correct way to write your own name, capitalised or not, with or without the legal suffix.

11. Files and contacts

The last chapter, and the first one anybody looks for: where the files are, in which formats, which is correct for each situation, and who to ask when something is missing. A simple table:

What does not belong in guidelines

• Three pages on the founder's story. That belongs on the About page, not in an instruction manual.
• Moodboards without rules. A wall of attractive images is not a rule; it is a mood nobody can reproduce.
• Fictional applications. Impressive in a presentation, misleading in execution.
• Colour psychology theory. If the blue was chosen for a strategic reason, that reason belongs in chapter one, in a line.

Format: PDF, web page, or both

A PDF is useful for printers and for the archive, but it ages: the day a colour changes there are already twenty copies of the old version on various laptops.

A web page with downloads solves exactly that, one source of truth, updatable, with the files next to the rules. For most small companies the right combination is a web page as the source and a PDF exported from it for whoever asks.

Pre-delivery checklist

1. 01Can somebody outside the project find the correct logo file in under a minute?
2. 02Does every colour carry HEX, RGB and CMYK?
3. 03Is there a rule for dark backgrounds, not only light ones?
4. 04Are minimum size and clear space written relatively, not in millimetres?
5. 05Is there a fallback typeface for cases where the licence does not apply?
6. 06Are there at least six misuse examples, with images?
7. 07Are the applications shown things the company actually produces?
8. 08Does it say anywhere who to ask when the guidelines do not cover the situation?

Getting to one without an agency

Written from scratch, guidelines take a few days and assume the system is already decided. If it is not, the right order is strategy, then visual identity, then the document.

In RHAM, the guidelines are generated from the decisions already made in the project (the mark, the palette, the type, the rules) and exported alongside the files: SVG, PNG, favicon, CSS tokens, in one archive. The same chapters as above, without the risk of the document contradicting the delivered files, because both come from the same place. See the plans.