What Are Brand Guidelines and Why Do You Need Them?
Brand guidelines help you maintain a consistent look and message no matter where your company ends up, how it grows, and who’s in charge of creating content. They detail every essential element of a modern brand, from the way it looks to the way it communicates.
Why Are Brand Guidelines Important?
Consistent branding shows stakeholders that you’ve studied your brand identity and helps establish brand recognition and familiarity with members of your target audience. For example, if you’re sending a letter to venture capitalists, you want them to visit your website and see the same colors, typography, and communication styles as they see in the letter. This goes for everybody when they see your brand – whether it’s a social media ad, a press release, a website, etc. – you want them to instantly know who you are and remember what you do.
Does Every Brand Have Brand Guidelines?
The complexity of a brand guidelines booklet largely depends on a company’s size and development stage. A small or very new business can usually get away with a few pages that outline its brand’s visual and editorial identity. On the other hand, a large, established corporation with thousands of employees and a world presence will need a more comprehensive guide to ensure consistency throughout the entire experience.
Budget is another factor that determines the complexity of a company’s brand guidelines. As a branding agency, we have three tiers of branding packages to accommodate various budgets – anything from a responsive logo and color palette to a comprehensive brand guidelines booklet that can grow with the company for years.
While some brands have pages of guidelines and others have one, there are a few common elements that all brand guidelines should include.
Starting with a Brand Identity
A brand identity encapsulates what your brand stands for, its chief characteristics, how it communicates with its target audience, and what it wants to achieve. When we create brand guidelines, we explore these topics through the mission statement, vision, brand values, consumer personas, tone, and marketing avenues, among others.
Defining Visual Elements
Brand Logo
A logo is one of the most fundamental elements of a brand that visually identifies everything it touches. And, since not everything your brand touches is the same size or medium, you need to have responsive iterations for various applications, sizes, and colors.
Brand Colors
Your brand’s color palette will guide you as you design your website, create your products, email signatures, and more. We even dive into color psychology to ensure your brand’s colors have the desired effect on your customers.
Brand Typography
Your font says a lot about your brand. Are you playful and trendy? Are you seasoned and motivated? Beyond that, using the same font combinations no matter where your brand writes speaks volumes about your professionalism.
Working with a Branding Agency to Develop Brand Guidelines
Brand guidelines establish the direction for your entire brand, so they’re a big and often paralyzing decision for business owners. However, with a million cheap logo maker websites, you might wonder what’s the advantage of using a branding agency instead.
Hiring a branding agency is advantageous because it places the decision in the hands of someone with no personal connection to the brand and a track record of similar work. We can make decisions about the logo, colors, fonts, and tone backed by data as opposed to personal preferences.
When you decide to work with Kreativ Alchemy, we’ll meet with you to understand your business’s mission, services, and target audience. We’ll present a few initial mockups of your logo to make sure we’re moving in the right direction. Once we decide on a logo, we can start working on your brand guidelines to fully cover the aesthetic scope of your startup.
If you’re interested in learning more about our brand guidelines development services, email us at info@kreativalchemy.com to get started.