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Brand Design Guide
Introduction
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Introduction

What is a brand guide?

A brand guide, also known as brand guidelines or a style guide, offer clearly defined rules on how your brand should be represented publicly. Think of it like a brand ‘rulebook’ that centralizes the overall look and feel of your brand identity – such as its logo, color palettes, typography, tone of voice, and other elements that contribute to your unique
brand identity
⁠
.
By utilizing a brand guide, organizations can help ensure brand consistency and control over how various stakeholders create and communicate brand assets.
Learn more:
What are brand guidelines?
⁠
.

How do you create a brand guide?

Bynder’s Brand Guidelines solution helps organizations create an interactive digital home for their brand guide, centralizing key brand elements such as style guides, legal documents, how-to manuals,
creative workflow processes
⁠
, and more.
Cloud-based and accessed directly from a browser, teams, and external stakeholders can easily centralize and educate everyone on how to create and use on-brand assets. Users can create and edit a configurable set of brand guidelines describing your brand identity and story, making important elements such as fonts, logos, videos, and tone of voice accessible to everyone.
Bynder’s Brand Guidelines are integrated with our
digital asset management (DAM) solution
⁠
, ensuring users will always have the latest version of assets at hand. Any changes made in the DAM will be immediately reflected in the Brand Guidelines module.
Get a quick overview of the key benefits and features:
Factsheet: Brand Guidelines
⁠
.

What is in a brand guide?

Each brand guide is unique, as they differ depending on the organization. But the following brand elements are usually a must-have to include when creating your own brand guide:
Mission statement and brand values: This helps readers to better understand the history, positioning, and overall mission of your organization.
Logo design and usage: Guidelines on logo usage, including color palettes, file format(s), contexts, spacing, and usage permissions, such as where logos should and shouldn’t appear.
Imagery: Iconography, image design elements, and perhaps a style of photography to be used/not used.
Fonts: Font styles and text sizes for both print and digital media.
Color palette: Preferred color palette information, including CMYK and RGB codes.
Tone and grammar: Instructions on the brand tone of voice and rules on grammar.
Cards and letterheads: How to use
brand templates
⁠
, also for business cards and letterhead designs.
Effective brand guidelines are those that can be shared and understood easily by anyone involved in communicating your brand—both internally and externally. So it’s recommended that they should be concise, easy to read, and digitally accessible.
For more best practices, read:
Four tips to follow when creating your brand guide
⁠
.

Why are brand guides important?

A brand guide is an essential rulebook on how an organization presents itself to the world, helping to differentiate the brand from competitors. They get everyone—marketers, designers, and agencies—singing from the same song sheet, so your brand can create a distinctive, recognizable, and consistent identity. In summary, here are a few reasons why creating a brand guide is so important:
Ensures a single source of truth: Internal and external stakeholders know exactly where to find the latest rules on how to use and communicate brand assets, boosting brand consistency and reducing the likelihood of incorrect and/or outdated branding.
Visual brand recognition: By including the do’s and don’ts of a brand’s visual brand identity, it makes it easy for stakeholders to recognize and understand the rules on how a brand should visually be conveyed.
Creative efficiency: When designers, marketers, and other stakeholders have access to a brand guide, they can collaborate more efficiently when creating brand assets and marketing materials.
Risk mitigation: A brand guide can also serve as a protective measure, ensuring a brand’s identity and assets are used correctly. With guidelines on typography, logo usage, and other visual elements, organizations can prevent the misuse of their brand
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