Welcome back to part 6 in our developing your brand series. This series has been created to show you how to define and implement a decent brand for your business without needing to pay a large sum to an agency. If you’ve missed any of the previous posts from this series you can find them here:

Part 1: What is branding?

Part 2: Audience Research

Part 3: Brand Values

Part 4: Tone of voice

Part 5: Design

This is the last part in this series and in it we’ll be sharing advice on how to create comprehensive brand guidelines that you and your team can use in the future.

Consider the basics

Before you create your brand guidelines document, you should answer some basic questions about how they will be used. The first of these is to consider who these guidelines will be for. Are they for your in-house design team and copywriters, are they for your support agents, or are they just for the external agencies that you work with? If these guidelines are for people that work with you in-house, it might make sense to get them involved with the brand guidelines from the start so you can be sure that they are created to be as usable as possible for your team. However, if the guidelines are for external agencies, then it’s possible that you might have to be more detailed in the information that you provide, because people outside of your company might not instinctively know things about the brand and the reasons that you do things like a seasoned in-house team would.

The other main question to ask is where and how should the guidelines be accessed. If the guidelines will just be used by a handful of in-house people, it might make sense to have a few versions of the guidelines printed to a high quality, but it may be more appropriate to simply provide them as an online document if it will be used by a large number of people in multiple locations.

Define your level of detail

Some brand guidelines documents are highly effective because they are extremely specific about how even the smallest aspects of the brand should be presented, resulting in a highly consistent branding experience for the company’s customers. However, a common issue with brand guidelines that contain this level of detail is that they don’t allow for much experimentation and creativity on the part of those that use them, meaning that the brand is less likely to evolve to keep up with trends and emerging customer requirements. It’s important to establish what level of detail is right for your brand guidelines to achieve a comfortable balance for all involved. I think the best information to base your level of detail upon is how you currently work with the people that will be using your brand guidelines. Do you often give designers and copywriters very specific briefs or do you give them more freedom to use their own judgement?

Provide fully art-worked examples

Another way to make your brand guidelines effective is to provide fully art-worked examples of how work looks when it is put live/published. This helps to give designers and copywriters a clearer picture of what the end result of projects might look like and how their work will interact with the work of others in the finished product. This is also useful for the simple fact that it is more specific than simply describing the design style or tone of voice in general terms; this way the people involved can see how these rules are applied in practice.

Explain your thinking

You should explain the reasons why your brand should be presented in the ways that you’re recommending within your brand guidelines document. This is particularly important if people from external agencies will be using the guidelines, but it is also relevant for in-house teams. Just because it is immediately apparent to whoever creates the guidelines/brand why things should be a certain way doesn’t necessarily mean that those reasons are clear to everyone else. Providing the logic behind your choices is also a good way to test their value as you might find that it’s quite difficult to justify a particular way of communicating your brand and this may lead you to change it to be more valuable.

Examples

Lastly, if you’d like to take a look at some particularly good brand guidelines documents for a little inspiration, take a look at the following.

Macmillan’s Brand Guidelines

Macmillan has an excellent example of very specific brand guidelines to establish a highly consistent brand. For instance, the image below shows a range of rules within the document that Macmillan created for their secondary font, Futura BT.

Skype’s Brand Guidelines

For a looser example of brand guidelines, take a look at the ones from Skype. In the image below, Skype is saying that it’s better if a cloud can be anchored to an edge, but it’s not a huge deal if this isn’t quite right.

That’s it. We hope you’ve enjoyed this series on developing your brand and we hope it helps you to establish a consistent and valuable brand that works for you.

Do you have any top tips on branding? Feel free to share them in the comments below.