Creating a Simple Brand Guide for a Start-up
Brand development is a time consuming process. The growth of the Brand is ensured by the consistent use of logo, colors, typography, design style, tone of voice etc. Hence a brand guide becomes very much essential to maintain that consistency. Employees must be educated to follow the company design principles. Brand Guide would be the reference for them. It avoids unnecessary chaos and confusion and improves the overall workaround time
Importance of Brand Consistency
Let’s look at an example, Amith applied for a bank account and submitted all his documents which were asked. The bank verified the documents and created a new account for him. Amith received a welcome mailer the bank as the below image shows.
He read the mailer, notice the color, image etc and He know it for sure it was from the same bank where he submitted his documents yesterday. Subsequently, he has received many other mails from the bank, everything went smoothly.
At one day, amith has got a problem. He has received a mailer from his bank saying "please click the link below and change your password immediately. Amith found something fizzy in that mail. He noticed the mailer design is not relevant what he has seen before. He suspects this could be a spam mail and ignored the mail without taking any action.
But what actually happened was, a new designer joined the team, and because there was no brand guide to refer, he followed his own pattern. This is why a brand guide is important. Design creates a visual library inside us. Anything which is conflicting with us will not be trusted. Same thing has happened on amith case. Hence the consistency is very important for the brand development.
Every designer has their own style of doing. Business needs multiple designers to execute each campaign. Brand Guide helps to regulate them all in the desired direction and attain the final goal.
What a visual guide must have?
Ok, now I'm convinced we need a brand guide. “What is should have?” must be our next question. Design requirement of every company is different. For example IT companies such as Wipro would conduct conference and events, participate in auctions, meet new customer and present their proposal, introduce new technology idea etc. They do lot of campaign to attract customers, where as an Auditing company like KPMG, They might create more report, presentation, Infography and many data driven visuals. The graphic requirement of every company is different. Similarly the new age companies like Uber and whatsapp. The content in the visual guide will also vary accordingly. It will be very elaborate to describe all of them in a single post, Hence I have explained some of the most essential core elements to be there in a visual guide.
Here we would find the logo of the company with its other variants, link to download them in vector format, do's and don'ts etc.
This section has information about the history of the company, motto of the company and its core values etc. Every designer would love to know about the company. This would help them to choose the right styling.
This is a very important section for any company who runs on information. This will have details about the fonts to be used, size, combination, chart visual etc.
Mention the colour codes of the brand and their values in RGB, CMYK, and Panton Value etc. Then for more colour options it’s good to define primary colours and secondary colours.
Few companies have no objections on using vector images, but few companies are very strict about their image usage, some examples to be shown to user to know what to use and what not to etc.
