What Belongs in a Brand Guidelines Document

A brand falls apart at the second supplier. The logo is fine, the first designer did good work — and then a printer, an agency and a freelancer each make reasonable guesses about type and colour, and within a year nothing matches.

Guidelines are the document that removes the guessing. Their value is entirely practical: they are what you send someone so the work comes back right the first time.

The essentials

Logo usage

Every approved variant, the minimum size for each, and clear-space rules expressed relative to the mark itself (not in millimetres, which stop meaning anything when it scales). Plus explicit do-not examples — stretched, recoloured, rotated, on a busy photograph, with a drop shadow added. The do-nots do more work than the dos, because they pre-empt the specific things people try.

Colour

Every brand colour in HEX, RGB, CMYK and Pantone. Not "our blue" — the exact values. Include the secondary palette, the proportions they should appear in, and which combinations are permitted for text. Contrast ratios for accessibility belong here too, since that is where they get forgotten.

Typography

The typefaces, their weights, where each is used, and a size scale with line heights. Critically: a licensed web fallback and a system fallback, because at some point someone will build something without your licensed font.

Applications

Worked examples on the things you actually produce — a business card, a social post, packaging, signage, a slide. This is the section people copy from, so it is the section that determines whether the guidelines get used or filed.

Worth including if relevant

• Photography direction — with real examples of right and wrong, not adjectives.
• Iconography — stroke weight, corner radius, grid.
• Tone of voice — only if written as before/after rewrites. Lists of adjectives change nothing.
• Motion — timing and easing, if you have an animated mark.

What is usually padding

Long brand-story essays, mood boards, mission statements and pages of adjectives. None of it helps a printer set up a job, and its presence tends to correlate with the practical sections being thin. A focused twelve pages that answers real questions beats sixty pages of atmosphere.

The test

Send it to someone who has never worked with you and ask them to produce a social post and a business card. Whatever they get wrong is what your guidelines are missing. Everything else is opinion.

You can read eleven real guideline documents we have produced, in full, on the work page — from short mini-guides to a thirty-seven page standards manual.