What is a set of brand guidelines?
A set of brand guidelines is the rulebook for a brand's identity. At minimum it covers the logo and how to use it, the color palette, the typefaces, the photography style and the layout system. Good guidelines go further: the tone of voice, the motion rules, the sound, the do and do not examples, and the reasons behind each choice, so that people can make sensible decisions in situations the document never imagined.
They used to be printed books. Today they are more often a living site or a shared file with downloadable assets, updated as the brand grows into new channels.
Why it matters
Why brand guidelines matter
A brand is made by dozens of people who never meet: internal teams, agencies, freelancers, retail partners, a designer in another country laying out a menu. Guidelines are how all of them make work that looks like it came from the same place. Without them the brand drifts, one reasonable decision at a time, until the logo appears in four different greens. With them, new work starts faster, approvals are quicker because the arguments are already settled, and the identity gets the repetition it needs to become recognizable.
Guidelines also protect the investment. An identity project is expensive, and most of its value is realized in the years after launch, in thousands of pieces the original designers never see. A clear document is how that value survives staff turnover, new agencies and the pressure of a deadline at six on a Friday.
In practice
How brand guidelines work in practice
- 01
Guidelines are written at the end of an identity project, once the visual identity is final, and they should be tested before they are published. Someone who did not design the brand tries to make real work from them, and whatever they get wrong shows what the document failed to explain.
- 02
After launch, one person or team owns them. They answer questions, approve exceptions, add sections as new channels appear (vertical video, a new retail format) and retire rules that no longer serve. The guidelines that last are the ones treated as a tool people use every week rather than a file people received once.
At RIOT
Brand guidelines at RIOT
We built the identity for Coachtopia from its first day: the mark, the motion, the campaign and the launch. Making all four in one place is the best argument we know for writing the motion rules at the same time as the logo rules, because a new identity is usually seen moving, in a launch film or on social, long before anyone sees it on a printed page.
Watch out
What people get wrong about brand guidelines
Writing for static design only. Many guidelines say everything about the logo on a letterhead and nothing about how it animates, how type behaves on a phone screen or what the brand sounds like. The other mistake is making them so rigid that every piece looks identical. Guidelines should define the system and leave room for the work to surprise. A third is hiding them. Guidelines that live on one person's laptop protect nothing; they belong somewhere every partner can find them.
