How to Write Brand Guidelines: Six Essentials

Say “brand guidelines” and most people picture a forty-page brand book. But when someone outside your company needs to use your logo, they read about three pages of it.

Below is the minimum set: six items a team without a dedicated designer can realistically produce. After that comes the problem that usually follows, people working from an outdated copy of the rules, and how to deal with it.

Guidelines, brand books, and visual identity

These terms overlap. It’s easier to sort them by who the document is for than by what it happens to be called.

What guidelines are for

Guidelines are less a set of design restrictions than a way to cut down how often people have to stop and ask. A journalist needs your logo. A partner is building a customer story. An employee is making conference slides. If each of those turns into an “is this okay?” message, the guidelines are those answers written down ahead of time.

It follows that you don’t have to document things nobody asks about. Answering the questions you actually get produces something useful much sooner than trying to build a complete system.

The six items worth having

They’re in priority order. The first three cover most day-to-day requests.

1. The logo files. Which lockups are approved (horizontal, stacked, symbol only), for light and dark backgrounds.
2. Misuse examples. The alterations people actually make, shown as images.
3. Clear space, expressed relative to the logo’s own geometry (see How to Set Logo Clear Space and Minimum Size).
4. Minimum size, given separately for screen and print.
5. Brand colors, with HEX, RGB and CMYK.
6. A contact address for cases you didn’t anticipate.

An outline to copy

Writing from a blank page tends to stall. Take this table of contents, fill in the sections you can answer and leave the others empty. A section that stays empty is a sign you don’t need it yet.

It doesn’t need to be long. All eight sections can fit on a single page and still do the job.

Choosing file formats

Pick formats based on how the files will be used. If you’re unsure, include both an SVG and a PNG. The differences between the formats, and which to use where, are covered in Logo File Formats: SVG, PNG, PDF and AI.

SVG (vector)

SVG scales without losing quality, so on the web one file can serve both a large hero image and a favicon. For print, convert it to whatever the printer accepts (PDF or AI). If you export with live text rather than outlines, the logo will break on any machine that doesn’t have your font, so convert the type to outlines before exporting.

PNG (raster, transparent)

This is for anyone who can’t use vectors: slide tools, lightweight CMSes, social media upload forms. Export at roughly twice the largest size it will be displayed at.

PDF and AI

Printers and agencies will ask for these. It’s up to you whether they go on a public page, but if they’re there, you skip a back-and-forth every time something goes to print.

Specifying colors

Give brand colors separately for each medium. The usual mistake is publishing only the web HEX value and then finding that print doesn’t match. How the notations differ, and why RGB can’t be converted to CMYK exactly, is explained in Brand Color Codes: HEX, RGB, CMYK and Spot Colors.

• Screen: HEX or RGB
• Offset print: CMYK, plus a spot reference (PANTONE or similar) if you use one
• Alongside the primary color, a darker shade for text and a lighter one for backgrounds, so people don’t improvise their own

Also say whether the color can be used for text. A saturated brand color rarely has enough contrast as small type on white. A note such as “fine as a heading background, not as body text” heads off a lot of accessibility problems later on.

Typefaces and fallbacks

Type isn’t among the six items because someone who only needs to place your logo doesn’t need it. It starts to matter once partners produce material that represents your brand.

Spell out three things:

• The specified faces, including weights
• Licensing: the other party may not own the font, and you usually can’t redistribute it. Say so plainly
• The fallback. This is the one that matters most. Some people won’t have the licensed face, and if you don’t name a substitute, each of them picks their own

Writing the company and product name

People notice a distorted logo, but a misspelled name slips past, which is why wrong spellings can circulate for years. Write the rules down:

• The canonical spelling, including whether it’s one word or two
• Capitalization: is “MEDIAKIT” or “Mediakit” acceptable for “MediaKit”?
• ™ and ®: whether to use them, and whether only on first mention
• Abbreviations, and which ones are allowed
• The legal entity name, and when it’s required instead of the product name

Misuse examples

A guideline that only says “do not alter the logo” does very little, because the people altering it don’t think they are. Stretching the width to fit a space, adding a drop shadow, placing it on a photo: to the person doing it, each of these feels like normal use.

Instead, show the broken versions with a cross through each one. People remember a wrong shape they’ve seen far better than a rule they’ve read. At a minimum, make these four:

• Distorted proportions
• Recolored
• With effects added (shadow, glow, outline)
• Placed with insufficient contrast against the background

Handing them out

Emailing a PDF has a built-in problem: the recipient keeps a copy, and your updates never reach it. When you refresh the logo, whoever has the PDF you sent two years ago carries on using the old one.

The fix is to pick a single URL that always holds the current version and send people the link instead of the file. Choosing that location and naming the URL are covered in why your logo needs a public download page.

If you build it on MediaKit™, you register your logos, colors and rules, and the clear-space and minimum-size figures are drawn for you. The upload guide walks through the steps, and you can browse published examples in the directory.