Creating brand guidelines is important, but without knowing your brand goals, your guide could be useless. Before you even draft a style guide, it is a must to have already established what you want to achieve.
So, let’s have the 5 Things you should know before starting designing brand guidelines.
1) Goals
To create a style guide you need to have a deep understanding of brand guidelines goals.
The brand guidelines’ goal is to ensure that all parties use the brand elements consistently and to protect the strength of the brand so that it continues to create value for your company.
Brand guidelines achieve this by explaining the importance of your brand and describing how to use the elements of the brand, such as corporate identity and the brand name.
The Brand guide is the complete story of the brand and all the elements that go into it. It establishes strict guidelines on every aspect of how a company's brand will be managed and showcased.
2) Format
Brand guidelines come in many different shapes and sizes and there is no common book size. Many books fall under many different categories. If you were to try and pick sizes it would have to be the following;
- A5 (210x148mm 8.26×5.82 inches
- A4 (297x210mm / 11.69×8.26 inches
- US letter (215.9 x 279.4 / 8.5 x 11 inches)
- Landscape Orientation (1920x1080px )
3) Layout and grids
After picking a format that fits our needs. the next step is to pick a layout for a consistent look and understand the grids and layout Principles.
A grid is used to organize space and information for the reader and the secret to any good brand guidelines book in the way its visual elements are organized and positioned in relation to each other. This is exactly what layout design is all about.
The layout gives meaning to your design and makes it look visually appealing. It helps maintain balance from page to page or slide to slide and reflects the feeling of the brand that you looking to achieve.
For more about layout and grids, I highly recommend 2 books that help you understand the Design Principles for Using Grids.
- Layout Essentials: 100 Design Principles for Using Grids
- Grid Systems in Graphic Design Raster Systeme
4) Tools
The best way to know which software would suit you best is to get hands-on with the tool and experiment with them. Each of the software is characterized by its features, ease of use, performance, cost, and availability.
We have built a serval of templates using different software So we've put together a list of the best graphic design software in the field today. These tools are tried and tested and can help you create spectacular brand guidelines designs that will leave you and your client spellbound.
- Adobe InDesign
- Adobe illustrator
- Adobe XD
- Affinity publisher
- Affinity designer
- keynote
- PowerPoint
- Canva
5) Inspiration
For some inspiration, we’ve pooled Brand Guidelines resources It can be helpful to see the various grids, layouts, and details that inspire you.
- 17 Famous Brand Guidelines Examples That Can Inspire You To Create Your Next One
- 20 Brand Guidelines Documents PDF | Free Download
Conclusion
Creating a brand Guide without missing details and wasting time! It's crazily complicated to do. whether you're using the brand guidelines for your customer/ or for yourself. We have created a high-end brand guidelines that allow you to speed up the design process and produce high quality work that reflect what's the brand is truly about.
You can browse our Template by collection
