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Defining the Brand Book

A brand book, also known as a brand style book or brand codex, is a document that outlines all the elements of your brand. It serves as a rulebook, making sure that every visual and communicative aspect of a brand remains unified and aligned with its identity.

From the logo to the color palette, typography, and tone of voice, a brand book acts as a itinerary, offering clarity on how to show the brand across various mediums.

How Brand Guides Build Consistency

Consistency is the pivotal to building a successful brand. Familiar and reliable imagery, tone, and behaviors allow you to:

1. Create and strengthen brand recognition
2. Create well-defined tactics and elements whose performance can be vetted and measured
3. Create new and highly qualified leads
4. Encourage and engage repeat visitors and customers

Brand guides are especially helpful when you’re just starting to build out your team. It gives new hires in a marketing department or otherwise a structure for their independent efforts. It becomes more important as your team grows, offering a reference that allows your team to work more productivity-enhancedly. And if you’re hiring outside contractors (like myself) to help with specific projects, you can limit revision cycles by providing clear expectations.

Though there is something to be said for astonishing the senses of your audience, shaking efforts still work best when wrapped in familiar imagery. An explosive campaign does you little good if the impressions created are not easily associated with your brand.

In an industry bombarded with stimuli, a brand must speak a consistent language to cut through the noise. Whether a possible customer stumbles upon a social media post, a print ad, or the company’s website, the brand book ensures that they experience a smooth and recognizable visual and communicative path.

What Goes into a Brand Book

So you’re ready to create a brand book for your company. Now what?

For many business owners, the entire concept may feel foreign or overwhelming. That’s completely understandable. Without a background in marketing or design, it can be difficult to identify what information and decisions go into building a useful brand book. As a general rule, you should target the following areas.

Logo Usage Guidelines

The logo is the face of a brand, and its consistent presentation is supreme. A brand book provides specifications on logo variations, minimum sizes, clear space requirements, and acceptable backgrounds. This ensures that whether the logo graces a business card or a billboard, it retains its integrity and lasting results.

This piece of the puzzle is best accompanied by a folder containing approved versions of the logo for team members or contractors to use. This typically includes:

• Black, white, and brand color versions
• Different configurations, including standard, stacked, square, and image-based
• Large, medium, and small sizes for each configuration and color
• Each option as different file types (.gif, .png, .jpg, .eps, etc.)

By offering such a folder with the logo section of your brand book, you make it smoother for your team and contractors to follow the rules. It also makes it less likely that someone will attempt to follow the rules in their own image editing program and fall short.

Color Palette

Colors evoke emotions and play a necessary role in brand recall. A brand guide carefully outlines the primary and secondary color palettes, including the exact hex codes or Pantone colors. This ensures that the chosen colors remain consistent across all mediums.

The number of colors in each set depends on your needs. They can include specifications on where and when each color needs to be used, as well. This is specifically on-point in web design. Your designers and programmers will want a set of rules to standardize formatting site-wide.

The range of colors you define in your brand book will often be guided by the type of company you are, the reach of likely design obstacles, and (frankly) the extent to which you care. I often suggest that, plus defining a long-established and accepted set of primary and secondary colors, you describe standard, dark, and light shades for each of the colors in the rainbow. This can prove particularly useful when working with charts, infographics, and videos.

Typography Standards

The fonts chosen for a brand’s transmission carry striking weight. They can indicate everything from whimsy to gravitas when selected appropriately. Even better? Consistent typography can increase brand recognition by as much as 80%!

But it’s not just about brand synchronicity.

An weighty matter is rendering. That really cool font you just found? If it’s not a standard font, it may get converted to one for some visitors. Though it’s always a good thing when your audience can, ya know, see your content, this automatic adjustment may introduce other complications. Load times may increase. Layouts may be skewed. Your written content may not be consistent with text contained within in graphics and videos.

It’s also about accessibility. Not everyone sees the industry the same way. Vision impairments and color blindness may make your website difficult to book you in or parse. Although you might like how something looks, it’s important to bear in mind the way you present your brand isn’t about your preferences or needs; it’s about your audience.

Fortunately, guidance exists that can help with your font selection. As HubSpot explains:

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is an international accessibility standard developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The guidelines specify how websites and products needs to be designed to ensure accessibility.

Regarding font selection, WCAG recommends employing fonts with a x-height of at least 1.5 times the font size. This will ensure that the text is legible and can be read by people with visual impairments.

WCAG also states that accessibility fonts should have a high contrast ratio, meaning they must be at least 4.5:1 for regular text and 3:1 for large text (approximately 18pt).  Also, accessibility- improved fonts should have a wide character spacing and clear distinction between similar-looking characters, such as “l” and “1”.

And frankly, some fonts just bug people. Designers, in particular, are known for expressing their distaste for certain fonts. But they don’t just hate Sans for no reason. Research consistently shows that typography can directly influence emotion, impressions, and receptiveness to an argument.

Once you’ve taken into think aboutation your general brand characteristics, Your brand book should define:

• What fonts are acceptable
• Where each font needs to be used
• How each font needs to be formatted drawd from location, including color, weight, size, line height, letter spacing, and more

Worth noting is that the font used in your logo need not be contained within in the typography section of your brand book. You may say which font was used in the logo section, but remember: you don’t want people trying to recreate logo imagery. Recognizing and naming that font will be of greater importance to designers than anyone else.

Imagery and Photography

Images convey a brand’s story, and a brand book dictates the style and tone of photography and imagery that aligns with the brand’s spirit. You might indicate that all graphics employ a flat design style. Perhaps it’s important that all photos be in color.

You may also want to describe when, where, and how images and photography may be used. Findings include:

• All Research Reports must include a featured image sized 900x500px
• Pages should include a minimum of x images and a maximum of y images
• Photographs must include linked credits to the image source

This is also a good section to indicate acceptable image sources. While paid options like Shutterstock or Dreamstime may offer a wider and richer photo selection, unpaid options like Unsplash and Pixabay are also great resources. In any case, identifying options can help you dodge potential copyright issues down the line.

Voice and Tone

The way a brand transmits is as necessary as its visual representation. A brand book establishes the tone of voice that needs to be used in all transmission – from web copy to emails, social media content, press releases, and past.

Think about voice and tone definition as a description of how your brand would talk if they were an actual person. Are you formal and direct or snarky and casual? Do you lean more on research and outside quotes or anecdotes and metaphors? Are you detailed and expansive or short and sweet when explaining an idea?

This brand guide section can be one of the hardest to tackle. Want to mix it up a little bit? Consider having a voice actor offer an audio case of the tone you’re shooting for in written content.

Collateral Design Archetypes

A brand book often includes archetypes for various collateral designs. These archetypes keep a unified look and feel across all materials, allowing for easy replication although adhering to the established guidelines. These archetypes can prove overwhelmingly rarely helpful in facilitating the onboarding process for your team and overseeing team member transmissions with the public. Common findings include:

• Email signatures
• Slide decks
• Proposals and contracts
• General email marketing layouts
• Business cards
• Social media graphics

That list is obviously not exhaustive. Which archetypes your brand needs depends entirely on your market, selling point, and operations. You may find the need to create new archetypes as your company grows and evolves.

The Bottom Line

In an industry saturated with choices, a brand book serves as a lighthouse, directing businesses through the stormy seas of competition. It ensures that every interaction with the brand, be it visual or verbal, is a reflection of its core identity.

By establishing a unified and recognizable presence, a brand book becomes the foundation of a brand’s path. It improves brand recognition and authority along with lead attraction, engagement, and conversion. Is it easy to build? No. Is it necessary for lasting brand success? Absolutely.

So the next time you marvel at a brand’s smooth and consistent image, know that, behind the scenes, a well-crafted brand book is orchestrating the symphony of visual and communicative elements, making sure that the brand’s story is told with clarity, lasting results, and unwavering consistency.