What should brand guidelines include?

Most brand guidelines sit unread in a shared folder. What to include in yours, what to leave out and how to make people actually use them.

Most brand guidelines are read twice: once when they're presented, and once when someone's looking for the logo file. The rest of the time they sit in a folder while people improvise.

That's usually because they were written to impress, not to help. Good brand guidelines are a tool for someone in a hurry. Here's what they should include.

Why the brand exists

Start with a page on what you stand for and who you're for. People make better calls when they know the reason behind a rule, and they'll need to make calls your document never predicted.

The essentials

Logo versions and how to use them. Colours, with the codes for screen and print. Typefaces, with what to use when you can't use them. Photography and illustration style, shown through real examples. How the brand sounds, with lines people can copy.

Real examples

Show the brand at work: a social post, a slide, a sign, an email. One good example answers more questions than a page of rules, and it shows how the pieces fit together.

Guidelines should make good work easier, not make bad work illegal.

What to leave out

Skip the forty pages of ways not to use your logo. Skip the essay on your brand journey. If nobody would look it up, it doesn't need to be there. Long documents don't get followed more carefully. They just don't get opened.

Do small businesses need brand guidelines?

Yes, but probably not a big document. As soon as more than one person is making things for your brand, you need a shared reference, or small differences start to add up. A freelancer picks a slightly different blue, a new starter writes in a different voice and before long nothing quite matches.

A small business can start with a few pages: your logo files, your colours, your fonts, a handful of examples and some words on how you sound. That's enough to keep things consistent, and you can add to it as you grow. Start with whatever people keep asking you for.

Make it easy to find and use

Keep it online rather than in a PDF that goes out of date, and put the files next to the rules. Name someone as the owner, so people know who to ask and so it gets updated. A brand should grow as you do, and its guidelines need to keep up.