What belongs in a brand guide: the standard contents

Brand guide, brand manual, brand book: the words are interchangeable, and most articles answering this question list ten sections and imply every one of them has all ten. Look at the guidelines real companies publish and that falls apart immediately, because they are not all doing the same job.

There are two species, and they are not comparable

A trademark permission document tells other people how they may use your marks. LinkedIn’s branding guidelines are exactly this: the [in] logo, the LinkedIn logo, badges, media usage, and a legal section covering ownership and withdrawal of permission. There is no colour palette. There is no typography. There is no tone of voice. It is a legal instrument with pictures.

Figma’s public trademark guidelines are the same species. They define the marks, require your own marks to be more prominent than Figma’s, and set a grammar rule: always use the name as an adjective, never a noun or a verb. Colour and typography are not on that page at all; they live in a separate Brand Book.

A brand system tells your own people how to build things. Slack’s brand center is this, and its section list is the most complete published example worth copying from:

• Identity: about the company, brand values, the name
• Elements: logo, brand architecture, co-branding, colours, typography, writing, brand shapes, emoji
• Expression: illustration, photography, motion, video, sound, icons, UI
• Experiences: events, CMS, email

If you are a business under fifty people, you want the second species and a small fraction of that list. You are not co-branding with Salesforce and you do not need a sound identity.

What is standard

Across the published guidelines worth reading, these appear in nearly all of them. This is the defensible core:

Section	What it has to answer
Logo and variants	Which file for which situation, and what the mark may not do
Clear space and minimum size	How small before it stops working
Colour, tiered	Which colours are load-bearing and which are accents
Typography	Display face, working face, and the fallbacks when neither loads
Usage rules	The don’ts, shown rather than described
Tone of voice	How it sounds, with examples in your own sentences
Imagery	What a photograph has to be to belong

Iconography, motion, accessibility and asset downloads appear in some. Brand architecture, sound, swag and emoji appear in one, Slack, and are not standard for anyone your size.

The page almost every guide omits

What does not exist yet.

A guide built for a one-person swimming practice ended with a page headed Files, and what is missing. It listed what existed: logo in full colour, palette with hex values, both typefaces self-hosted, the site in two languages. It then listed what did not: a cut-out logo with a real alpha channel, a light logo for dark surfaces, a portrait of the owner, her own photographs from the pool, and a redirect for the www. subdomain that resolved nowhere while old inbound links still pointed at it.

It also marked three numbers in the copy as proposed rather than confirmed, because the client had not yet verified them, and stated that no number about her own results appears anywhere until she has.

That page costs nothing to write and it is the most useful one in the document. A guide that lists its own gaps is a working document. A guide that does not is a sales artefact that will quietly waste someone’s afternoon in six months.

What good looks like on the small details

Two things separate a guide that holds from one that looks fine.

Colour, split by job rather than listed. “Load-bearing” and “supporting” is a more useful division than a row of swatches, because it tells someone which colour to reach for when they have one decision to make and no designer to ask.

Type with a reason. Naming a display face and a working face, saying what each is for, and specifying the system fallbacks means the brand still reads correctly on the day a font fails to load, which it will, in an email client, on someone’s locked-down work laptop.

The thing a guide cannot fix

A brand guide documents decisions. It does not find errors in the artwork it documents, unless someone checks.

At Bonatar, a machinery safety practice in Belgium, the supplied logo was read as source rather than looked at, and three faults turned up that were invisible by eye. The three horizontal bars of the CE monogram were centred on y=240 while the arc beside them was centred on y=256, so the mark had been sixteen units out of alignment in every application. The file declared a radius of 170, which cannot close a 372-unit chord, so every browser and every print RIP had silently inflated it to 186. The artwork did not describe its own output. And the two supplied files disagreed with each other, one setting the bars with square ends and the other with round.

All three were corrected before the guide was written, and the mark was rebuilt from a written construction spec so it can be reproduced from text rather than traced from a picture.

Ask whoever writes your guide whether they audited the artwork or just placed it.

Who should not buy one

• Your logo is not final. Wait. A guide written around a moving mark gets written twice, and you pay twice.
• You are the only person who will ever apply it. Rules exist to keep other people consistent with you. With nobody else to keep in step, the same money buys a photograph a customer will see.
• You want a design system. That contains components and code. A brand guide does not. The difference is here.

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A brand guide from this studio is $997, ten items you can see priced separately, and it ships with tokens as CSS and JSON so the website reads the same values the guide prints.

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