Brand book (brand guidelines)
What is a brand book (brand guidelines)?
A brand book, also called brand guidelines, is the document that sets the rules for using a brand: where the logo may go, which colours and typefaces belong to it, and what must not be done with them. It is written for everyone who makes something in the company’s name — a designer, a printer, an agency or a member of staff — so the next banner or label comes out like the ones before it.
Example
A bakery with three shops opens a fourth. The manager sends the mark to a local sign maker by downloading the picture from the Facebook page. The sign maker enlarges the file, cleans up the edges his own way and picks the nearest red he keeps in stock. The sign comes back in a different shade, set in heavier lettering than the one on the paper bags.
With a brand book the exchange is shorter. The sign maker gets the vector mark, the red as a print value, the smallest size the mark may be used at and the empty space that has to stay around it. The new sign matches the bags and the windows of the other three shops, and checking it takes one look at the document instead of two days of email.
Why it matters for a business
Recognition only adds up while the materials look related. Every drift — another shade, another typeface, the mark dropped on top of a photograph — resets the counter and makes a customer wonder whether this is the same company.
The document also saves time. Colour, type and placement are decided once and then quoted. When the team changes or a new supplier starts work, the rules stay inside the business instead of inside the head of the designer who invented them.
What to ask
- Does it cover the carriers you actually use: shop window, workwear, van, label, presentation, social profile?
- Are the colours given for screen, for print and for cut vinyl, or only once?
- What is the smallest size the mark stays readable at, and what happens when the space is small and square?
- Who updates the document when a new carrier appears, and how do the new rules reach suppliers?
- In what form do you receive it, and can you forward it to a printer without handing over everything else?
A brand book is the last step of branding: the rules get written once the mark, the colours and the typefaces are settled, and they are what keeps the fifth shop looking like the first.