What is a Brand Guide? Why is it Important?

By Ben Hall

What is a brand guide?

A brand guide is a wonderful tool that sets and keeps track of all of the rules and regulations that a business follows when making, curating, and presenting anything related to their brand—think logo design, voice, and more.

Also known as brand guidelines, a style guide, and a brand style guide, this document walks you through things like brand story, typography, logo design, voice, and all of the various visual elements that create a brand. In short, a brand guide keeps your brand identity clear and consistent across every medium of communication.

What's in a brand guide?

There are a multitude of elements that can be in a brand guide. Since brand guides cater to each individual company, it’s rather difficult to definitively state what you’ll find in one. Although, there are a few things that are consistent throughout all of them.

Brand Logo - This section details everything someone needs to know about properly using your logo. It covers everything related to logo design like colors, scaling, clear space, guidelines on what to not do with the logo, and more.

For some logo designs, the brand guide will also detail the same information for a submark—a less detailed version of the logo, often used like a watermark.
Color Palette - Unfortunately, colors can be fickle. Keeping track of all of the CMYK, RGB, and HTML hex values can be a thorn in your side. The slightest change in a single color value can throw off an entire design, document, or whatever is being worked on. The color palette within a brand guide keeps track of all of these values, ensuring that the correct colors are used at all times.
Typography - Typography dictates everything you need to know about the fonts your brand uses. It covers everything relating to the font families and typefaces; things like font sizes, weights, and hierarchies.

Oftentimes, larger companies take the time to specify more elements like the brand story, how to use illustrations, and even how to write on behalf of the company. Examples of these other brand guide elements include:

Brand Story - This acts as an introduction to the brand, detailing the brand mission, values, and personality.

Writing Style - Everyone has a different voice. A writing style section works in conjunction with editorial guidelines to help ensure consistent tone, personality, and language to use when writing on behalf of the company.

Editorial Guidelines - These guidelines detail how and when to refer to specified products, services, locations, key words or whatever may need active spelling and grammar regulations.

Graphic Elements - It should go without saying that keeping your brand’s visual elements in check is really important when it comes to maintaining a clear and consistent brand identity. Because of this, detailed brand guides often set rules for things like illustrations, patterns, icons, and shapes—any miscellaneous established elements that coincide with logo design or the general brand.

Why brand guides are important

As mentioned previously, brand guides are important because they establish and maintain consistency across the entire brand. This consistency is achieved by setting the standards for all design and copy elements.

Creating these standards help to eliminate any confusion or contradictions among anyone drafting documents, web design, or any given medium. Moving forward, these standards keep your brand on track. This makes it easier to maintain clear, recognizable brand identity and even facilitate changes in the future when needed.

All of this culminates to not only reducing headaches for you and your company, but these factors all work together to increase your brand’s perceived value. Maintaining the quality, integrity, and consistency of your brand allows it to convey a true sense of professionalism and reliability.

Alopex can help you get your brand on point. Our team focuses on clarity and quality. Through precise logo design, voice, brand identity, and more, we will establish the feeling your brand needs and effectively carry it throughout every aspect of your business. Having worked with many different sizes of brands and businesses, Alopex is ready to bring yours to the next level. All you need to do is give us a call or reach out today.