Brand Guidelines Cheat Sheet: What You Need to Include?

This article is a brand guidelines cheat sheet to help your branding journey and equip you with essential information to create your amazing brand.

Brand guidelines go beyond an icon or a logo. They also include your brand’s fonts, tone, colours, visuals, and imagery guide. The world’s most well-known companies have strong brand guidelines they strictly follow. And they do it to ensure their brand message stays coherent and easily recognisable.   

People easily identify global brands because of their strict repetition of colours, logos, images, and fonts. Without strict consistency, brands will lose their ability to communicate well with their target audience. This ultimately leads to fewer sales and confused customers.

As you keep reading, you will find out what brand guidelines are all about, what to include in yours, and how not to drive away your potential customers. 

What Should Brand Guidelines Include?

Branding is what people say about your business when you are not in the room; how a customer or potential client perceives you. Branding is a powerful weapon that helps you leave a memorable impression on your audience. 

Branding is powerful, that is why guidelines are in place to ensure consistency. So, what are brand guidelines? They are like a ‘rulebook’ to help you build a consistent experience to stand out from your competitors. 

Moving forward, let’s now talk about things you should include in your brand guidelines. Although brand guidelines have no strict formula, there are many ways to communicate your brand. Here are some of the essential elements you can include fitting your brand specifications: 

• Brand Story: Storytelling is an effective branding and marketing tool because many people are drawn to stories. You can share stories of how you started your brand (the ups and downs of your experience) and why you started in the first place (what motivated you). The brand story lays a good background for building your brand guidelines. Also, it educates your employees, designers, and audience about who you are.

• Typography: Typography is arranging texts and letters to make a copy clear, visually appealing, and legible to the reader. It involves font style and appearance, aiming to elicit emotions and underlying messages.

Typography in brand guidelines brings the text to life, provides graphic balance, informs your users, sets your product’s tone, and influences customer decision-making. Some popular font styles you can explore are Script, Decorative, Serif, Decorative, Slab Serif, and Sans serif.

• Images: In the brand, guidelines cheat sheet, images will help portray the feel and look you want for your brand. It is essential to select images that will evoke the intended kind of feeling you want people to get when they see your brand. Before choosing the style of your pictures, ask yourself specific questions like, will it be a close-up or wide-angle picture? Will it be a commercial or artistic style? Images also contribute to your social media feeds. 

• Colours: When colours are used correctly, they set tones, evoke certain feelings, and much more. Did you know that colours have a direct impact on our emotions? 

A colour like red is emotionally intense and can be seen as a source of strength and power or convey love and passion. White communicates purity and cleanliness. When your brand builds an association with colours, it’s easily recognised. So make sure you use the right colour to evoke a suitable feeling in your brand.