Brand guidelines are one of the most underused assets in business. Organizations invest in brand strategy, develop a brand story and visual identity, and compile a thorough brand guide, only to let it sit in a shared drive while employees from across the organization continue to use three different logo files and a font nobody can identify. The problem usually isn't the brand guide. It's that the guide is not useful, nor socialized across the organization. Folks are not held accountable to using it.
What Most Brand Guides Get Wrong
The classic brand guide is long, beautifully designed, and built to show creative work. It covers logo variations, color codes, typography specimens, and brand philosophy in extensive detail.
What it often fails to include: practical guidance for the actual situations your team faces.
- What font goes on a sales sheet?
- Which logo version works on a dark background?
- How do you describe the company in a one-sentence email intro?
If your team can't find the answer in under 30 seconds, they won't look. They'll use their best judgment—which is how you end up with six different versions of your brand in the wild.
Build for Application, Not Admiration
Unless you have complete control over all communications in your company (you win the gold medal if you do), your fellow employees across the company are already creating collateral. They have questions. Start by gathering those questions from the people who produce the most brand touchpoints: your marketing team, your sales team, and your operations team.
The most common questions we hear:
- Which logo do I use, and when?
- What's the correct way to describe what we do in one sentence?
- What tone should I use in an email to a prospective client?
- Can I use my own photography, or do I need to use the approved images?
- What do I do when the template doesn't fit my situation?
A brand guide that answers these questions directly—with examples—will get used. One that requires interpretation usually won't.
The Right Length for a Brand Guide
There is no universal answer, but here's a useful frame: a brand guide should be as long as it needs to be to answer the most common questions, and no longer.
For a small to mid-size business with a clear, consistent visual identity, a 10 to 20 page document is usually sufficient. The sections that earn the most use:
- Logo usage: primary, secondary, and clearspace rules
- Color palette: primary, secondary, and their approved uses
- Typography: which fonts, in which weights, for which purposes
- Tone and voice: how the brand speaks in writing
- Real-world examples: the guide applied to actual templates and materials
Make It Accessible
The most practical brand guide in the world is useless if nobody can find it. Establish one location. Make sure every person who produces brand materials knows where it lives and how to access it.
Some organizations supplement a static PDF with a shared template library that includes pre-built PowerPoint decks, email signatures, proposal covers, etc., so that team members can maintain brand consistency without even opening the guide.
The measure of a good brand guide isn't how impressive it looks. It's how often it gets opened and followed.
Keep It Current
Brand guides go stale. When your visual identity is updated, when your messaging evolves, when new channels are added, the guide needs to follow. An outdated brand guide is worse than no brand guide, because it creates confusion about what's current. It leads to disjointed marketing and confused audiences. Build in a quarterly or annual review to keep the guide relevant.
Start Simple
If you don't have a brand guide today, don't wait for the perfect one. Start with the basics: logo files in the right formats, your exact color codes, your approved fonts, and two or three sentences that describe your brand clearly.
That's enough to produce meaningful consistency—and it's a foundation you can build on.
Ready To Start Work On Your Brand Guidelines?
If you've read this far, you're already ahead of most organizations hoping to improve their brand guidelines. The next step is a conversation. Huston Design has spent more than 25 years helping Wisconsin-area organizations in biotech, energy, healthcare,research, nonprofits; basically Madison area and national businesses of every kind, create their brand guidelines. We create brand guidelines that get used and help maintain brand consistency across marketing, sales, service, and all other communications channels.
Whether you're ready to move now or still figuring out scope, we're glad to spend 30 minutes helping you think it through.
