Tips for a complete set of brand guidelines
Accessibility
Brand guidelines are essential for consistent application of the brand, as they prescribe the necessary rules for the correct deployment of assets onto collateral. With this in mind, it is crucial to ensure that they are accessible in multiple ways.
These consist of, but are not limited to:
Adaptive
Future growth is inevitable of a brand, therefore its essential to create a system with conventions that can accommodate this. By ensuring this, it allows a brand to expand and grow with new technologies and practices, ensuring a brand is up to date and still consistent.
Utilising graphic devices
Brand guidelines will need to be used by a lot of people, this could be both internal and external. Nevertheless, it’s important that everyone can understand them. Ensure that all typographic application is consistent and optimised for size of your guidelines. Furthermore, prioritise the use of colour to ensure contrast and legibility is also optimised.
Intuitive and simple
Simplicity is the best route for a complete set of brand guidelines as it allows people to understand them simply and directly, without the room for interpretation or overcomplication. Prioritise the use of layman’s terms over design terminology also, so that non-designers will understand them too.
Make them client specific
A set of brand guidelines is specific to a brand, therefore each set and project should be treated differently. Of course, there will be crossovers regarding content that is required such as logos, colour palettes and brand application, however it is important to ensure that this is tailored towards the actual brand being shown.
Collaborate
Ensuring that everyone that comes into contact with them is working towards the same goal will increase the chance of them being used properly. This will help with brand consistency and ensure that the brand is applied in the correct manner. Including all the right people will also ensure that any changes or ideas are streamlined into the document.
Keep them current
This is arguably the one of the most important tips for creating a complete set of brand guidelines. Keeping them up to date ensures that all the correct assets are used and that everyone is working with current version of the guidelines. This therefore limits the chance for brand inconsistencies or the chance of out-of-date assets being used in branded collateral.
Include all assets, and specify how to use them
Every single asset, typeface and graphic device you want to be used to represent and show the brand should be documented in the guidelines. This stipulates the correct application of the brand, reducing the risk of things being open for interpretation and thus the incorrect use of the brand.
Hopefully you found these tips useful, and can apply them when it comes to creating a complete set of brand guidelines. We found some of these tips extremely useful when creating guidelines for our clients, allowing us to create authentic and original work, ensuring our clients guidelines are second to none.