“Brand guidelines” tends to conjure a forty-page brand book. In practice, when someone outside your company needs to use your logo, they read about three pages of it.
This is the minimum set of six a team with no dedicated designer can actually produce, plus the problem that always follows — people keeping an outdated copy of the rules — and what to do about it.
Guidelines, brand books, and visual identity
The vocabulary overlaps, so it helps to sort it by who the document is for rather than by what it is called.
- Logo guidelines — the smallest useful unit: clear space, minimum size, prohibited alterations. This is the document outsiders actually need.
- Brand guidelines — the above plus color, typography and naming. What this article covers.
- Brand book — values, personality, tone. Written to align people inside the company; not what someone placing your logo needs.
- Visual identity / corporate identity — VI is the visual system, CI the broader corporate one. Guidelines are the operational form of the VI.
What guidelines are actually for
The purpose is not to restrict design. It is to reduce the number of times someone has 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 a “is this okay?” message, guidelines are simply those answers written down.
Which also means the inverse: you do not have to document what nobody asks about. Filling in the questions you actually receive gets you something useful far faster than aiming for a complete system.
The six items worth having
In priority order. Get the first three done and most day-to-day requests are covered.
- The logo files. Which lockups are approved (horizontal, stacked, symbol only), for light and dark backgrounds.
- Misuse examples. The alterations people actually make, shown as images.
- Clear space, expressed relative to the logo’s own geometry.
- Minimum size, separately for screen and print.
- Brand colors, with HEX, RGB and CMYK.
- A contact address for the cases you did not anticipate.
An outline to copy
Starting from a blank page stalls. Take this table of contents, fill in the sections you can answer, and leave the rest empty — an empty section is evidence you do not need it yet.
- 1. Logo — primary form and approved lockups
- 2. Logo — clear space and minimum size
- 3. Logo — acceptable backgrounds
- 4. Logo — misuse examples
- 5. Color — primary palette with HEX / RGB / CMYK
- 6. Type — specified faces and fallbacks
- 7. Naming — how the company and product are written
- 8. Contact
Page count is not the goal. All eight can fit on one page and still do the job.
Choosing file formats
Work backwards from how the files get used. When in doubt, always include both an SVG and a PNG.
SVG (vector)
Scales without degrading and works for both screen and print — the same file serves a billboard and a favicon. One caveat: if you export with live text instead of outlines, it breaks on any machine without your font. Convert type to outlines before exporting.
PNG (raster, transparent)
Needed for anyone who cannot handle vectors: slide tools, lightweight CMSes, social upload forms. Export at roughly twice the largest size it will be displayed at.
PDF and AI
Printers and agencies will ask for these. Whether you put them on a public page is your call, but having them there removes a round trip every time something goes to print.
Do
Offer per-file downloads rather than one large ZIP.
Name files so they explain themselves: acme-logo-horizontal-dark.svg, not logo_new_final2.png.
Don’t
Distribute JPEGs. No transparency, and compression chews up the edges.
Ship a single file and leave people to crop the variation they need out of it.
Specifying colors
Write brand colors per medium. Publishing only the web HEX value and then finding print does not match is the standard failure here.
- Screen: HEX or RGB
- Offset print: CMYK, plus a spot reference (PANTONE or similar) if you use one
- Beyond the primary, a darker shade usable for text and a lighter one usable as a background save people improvising their own
One more line worth adding: whether the color may be used for text. A saturated brand color rarely has enough contrast as small type on white. A note like “fine as a heading background, not as body text” prevents a whole category of accessibility problems downstream.
Typefaces — and what to use instead
Type is not in the six because someone who only needs to place your logo does not need it. It starts mattering as soon as partners produce material that represents your brand.
Three things to state:
- The specified faces, including weights
- Licensing — the other party may not own the font, and you usually cannot redistribute it. Say so plainly
- The fallback. The important one. Someone will not have the licensed face, and without a stated substitute everyone picks their own
Writing the company and product name
A distorted logo is visible; a misspelled name is not, which is why wrong spellings circulate for years. Put the rules in writing:
- The canonical spelling, including whether it is one word or two
- Capitalization — is “MEDIAKIT” or “Mediakit” acceptable for “MediaKit”?
- ™ and ® — whether to use them, and whether on first mention only
- Abbreviations, and which ones are allowed
- The legal entity name and when it is required rather than the product name
Show misuse, don’t describe it
A guideline that says “do not alter the logo” and nothing else does almost no work, because the people altering it do not think they are altering it. Stretching the width to fit, adding a drop shadow, dropping it onto a photo — each of those feels like ordinary use to whoever did it.
What works is showing the broken versions with a cross through each. Seeing the wrong shape sticks in a way that reading a rule does not. Four are worth producing at minimum:
- Distorted proportions
- Recolored
- With effects added (shadow, glow, outline)
- Placed with insufficient contrast against the background
Handing them out
One last thing. Emailing a PDF has a structural flaw: the recipient keeps a copy, and updates never reach it. You refresh the logo; the person holding the PDF you sent two years ago keeps using what they have.
There is one fix: decide on a single URL that always holds the current version, and point people there. Send the location, not the file. Which location to choose, and what to name the URL, is covered in why your logo needs a public download page.
If you build it on MediaKit™, registering your logos, colors and rules draws the clear-space and minimum-size figures for you. The steps are in the upload guide, and published examples are in the directory.