Brand guidelines are a critical tool for making sure that every experience across your website and marketing campaigns, offline and online, work together to build a consistent and compelling narrative. People make choices on which brand to buy in a split instance, based on what a brand stands for and how it makes them feel
We’re getting closer to needing a label. We already have a logo and I’ve been starting to explore how to apply the logo and different design elements on the website, but I really want to start codifying the brand and building usage guidelines to keep the usage consistent as I work across the different mediums for the website, label and marketing materials.
I’ve always been a huge fan of skate and surf brands. Not just because I identify with them, but because they are more flexible with using their name and logos than a lot of other companies. Hurley was one of the real innovators here, but Vans, Quiksilver and Billabong are brands that stand out to me as being flexible and creative in their branding.
Ok, so let’s get to the tips…
1. Start with a feeling
Any compelling experience starts with emotion. Your brand should be defined by how it makes people feel. Ideally this should begin when defining your brand and well before you’re writing guidelines, but it’s worth repeating every day.
2. Show, don’t tell
A picture is all that really matters for branding guidelines. You can’t explain your way through your brand, you need examples of how the different elements look and how they are used together whenever possible. The brand guidelines should feel like a living, breathing mood board that illustrates the overall composition and interplay between different elements like the style, logos, colors and typography.
3. Put it in context
Try to set the visualize how your brand and logo will play out in the real world. This includes your website and marketing campaigns, but there are tons of other applications. You may need business cards or letterhead, product packaging, merchandise or even a trade show booth in the future. So think about how your elements will look in the real world as well as online.
4. Test the boundaries
It’s worth illustrating where your brand guidelines are flexible and where there are hard boundaries. Often the boundaries that you don’t envision will be the ones that are tested in the real world on merchandise or a marketing campaign that ends up being a departure from your brand standards. And if you intend to provide flexibility on areas like color or logo variations, spell them out so to provide good guardrails by example.
5. Keep iterating
The first draft of your brand guidelines will be missing important information and they should evolve rapidly. In addition, you should revisit them regularly to make sure that your style guidelines still match the emotional tone that your brand is going for.
The Goods
Check out the recently-published Shaka Cola brand guidelines. They’re still an early version, but I’m sure we will be making updates in the near future.
I’m trying to make room in these guidelines for flexibility on merch and marketing campaigns. If you have feedback or ideas, please let me know.