Brand Guidelines keep your brand consistent and professional throughout all of its visual identity.
A strong brand will use its identity, value and tone of voice to reach a specific target audience to make it memorable and recognisable in today’s competitive market.
What is a brand identity?
A brand identity is more than just a logo, it is the whole visual toolkit that makes up your brand: the typography, the colour palette and the imagery. In essence, it allows customers to identify your brand!
So, what are brand guidelines?
Brand guidelines are a set of rules and guides for you to follow when putting your brand’s identity out into the world. If any of these are altered or distorted, it no longer represents your brand the way it was designed to. This can come across as confusing and unprofessional to your clients.
Colours
A single colour can represent a brand’s identity by itself – Subway’s green and yellow or Coca-Cola’s red can be easily recognised with no further context. However, colours can easily be lost and changed during printing processes, which is why it is vital that you have a set colour scheme with all the CMYK and RGB values at hand.
This way, the colours on your website will match the colours on your business cards, your signs, your packaging and so on. Accessibility is also a key consideration when designing a colour palette. Colour contrast and readability should be carefully thought about so that they can be understood and seen by your target audience and users.
Imagery can play a huge part in your identity too, and without guidelines, you can find yourself using images or photography that don’t represent what you are trying to communicate. Your brand’s tone of voice – the way it ‘speaks’ to your customers – is produced through your imagery, as well as the way the copy is written. Once you start to stray from the intended tone of voice you may find your company isn’t reaching your target audience, meaning you could miss out on potential customers.
Typography
And finally, your fonts. It may seem easy to stick to a single font, but there is more to it than you think. There are different sizes, weights and styles that all need to remain constant. This is where a simple guide could tell you in a second’s glance what you should be using and where.
All of these elements of your brand need to be kept consistent to enable you to have a strong and recognisable brand with a cohesive body of supporting material. With brand guidelines, you won’t have to worry about inconsistencies between printers and designers, and you will save time and money by not having to amend work and reprint inaccurate publications.
When working with clients, we will produce a brand guidelines document so that all of the above remains consistent and professional.
Contact us if you are interested in finding out more about how Studio Seventeen can use brand guidelines to help strengthen your brand.
