What You Should Include in Your Company’s Brand Guidelines

Have you ever stumbled across a company who uses colors that clash with their logo, multiple different font types, logos with white backgrounds when they should have been transparent, or something else that makes their company’s aesthetic inconsistent? Maybe you’re guilty of a couple of those things, too. It can be hard to keep your company’s branding consistent across platforms, plus different employees handling branding tasks may have different ideas of what looks visually pleasing. If you’ve run into any of these issues, you should consider creating brand guidelines to use for your business.

Brand guidelines catalog colors, type, logos, imagery, patterns, taglines, etc. of a brand to make sure branding remains consistent no matter where a piece of marketing collateral is or who creates it. Here at Pulse, we create brand guidelines for every client we design a logo for. These brand guidelines include several important pieces of information to ensure that our clients use their new brand in a way that remains visually appealing and consistent across platforms – one of the most important aspects of building brand awareness.

Here are four things you should include in your company’s brand guidelines:

• Brand Colors and Complementary Colors. Make sure you include the RGB, CMYK, and HEX color codes that make up your brand and use them whenever you create new materials to ensure you visual identity is cohesive. You should also include a few complementary colors to ensure an attractive presentation. We always recommend that clients do not pace their logo alongside bright primary colors, such as the default shades of red, green, and blue that are provided in various programs because they will likely clash with their brand.
• Typefaces and Fonts. At Pulse list the fonts a brand should use so our clients can always reference their guidelines and see what they should use in conjunction with their logo. We also include a short description of the font.
• Correct Usage. Using a transparent version of a logo when using it over active backgrounds, placing your logo according to its correct aspect ratio, and using colors opposite of the background when using a single-color version of a logo is important for anyone using your brand to know. We include this information as well as visual examples to show how a logo should and shouldn’t be used.
• File Formats. After providing our clients with a .zip file of their new logo that contains various file formats, we outline what each format is best used for in the brand guidelines. For example, an .EPS file is a scaleable vector version of a logo that is best for professional printing. Not everyone is aware of this, however, so outlining what each file format should be used for is always helpful.

You can include a variety of other details in your brand guidelines, such as what filters to use over images, which taglines to use, etc.

If you need brand guidelines created for your business, reach out to us for a free 30-minute consultation. We’ll be happy to help!