Brand Guidelines

A brand guide, also known as brand guidelines or a style guide, offer clearly defined rules on how your brand should be represented publicly. Think of it like a brand ‘rulebook’ that centralizes the overall look and feel of your brand identity – such as its logo, color palettes, typography, tone of voice, and other elements that contribute to your unique brand identity.

By utilizing a brand guide, organizations can help ensure brand consistency and control over how various stakeholders create and communicate brand assets.

Learn more: What are brand guidelines?.

Bynder’s Brand Guidelines solution helps organizations create an interactive digital home for their brand guide, centralizing key brand elements such as style guides, legal documents, how-to manuals, creative workflow processes, and more.

Cloud-based and accessed directly from a browser, teams, and external stakeholders can easily centralize and educate everyone on how to create and use on-brand assets. Users can create and edit a configurable set of brand guidelines describing your brand identity and story, making important elements such as fonts, logos, videos, and tone of voice accessible to everyone.

Bynder’s Brand Guidelines are integrated with our digital asset management (DAM) solution, ensuring users will always have the latest version of assets at hand. Any changes made in the DAM will be immediately reflected in the Brand Guidelines module.

Get a quick overview of the key benefits and features: Factsheet: Brand Guidelines.

Each brand guide is unique, as they differ depending on the organization. But the following brand elements are usually a must-have to include when creating your own brand guide:

• Mission statement and brand values: This helps readers to better understand the history, positioning, and overall mission of your organization.
• Logo design and usage: Guidelines on logo usage, including color palettes, file format(s), contexts, spacing, and usage permissions, such as where logos should and shouldn’t appear.
• Imagery: Iconography, image design elements, and perhaps a style of photography to be used/not used.
• Fonts: Font styles and text sizes for both print and digital media.
• Color palette: Preferred color palette information, including CMYK and RGB codes.
• Tone and grammar: Instructions on the brand tone of voice and rules on grammar.
• Cards and letterheads: How to use brand templates, also for business cards and letterhead designs.

Effective brand guidelines are those that can be shared and understood easily by anyone involved in communicating your brand—both internally and externally. So it’s recommended that they should be concise, easy to read, and digitally accessible.

For more best practices, read: Four tips to follow when creating your brand guide.

A brand guide is an essential rulebook on how an organization presents itself to the world, helping to differentiate the brand from competitors. They get everyone—marketers, designers, and agencies—singing from the same song sheet, so your brand can create a distinctive, recognizable, and consistent identity. In summary, here are a few reasons why creating a brand guide is so important:

• Ensures a single source of truth: Internal and external stakeholders know exactly where to find the latest rules on how to use and communicate brand assets, boosting brand consistency and reducing the likelihood of incorrect and/or outdated branding.
• Visual brand recognition: By including the do’s and don’ts of a brand’s visual brand identity, it makes it easy for stakeholders to recognize and understand the rules on how a brand should visually be conveyed.
• Creative efficiency: When designers, marketers, and other stakeholders have access to a brand guide, they can collaborate more efficiently when creating brand assets and marketing materials.
• Risk mitigation: A brand guide can also serve as a protective measure, ensuring a brand’s identity and assets are used correctly. With guidelines on typography, logo usage, and other visual elements, organizations can prevent the misuse of their brand

Centralizing and digitizing Brand Guidelines within your digital asset management solution (DAM) means that you have a single source of truth not just for your assets, but also for the rules around using and creating them. Brand assets such as logos, fonts, and colors along with the instructions are accessible for users and changes can be made easily and quickly. That way, everyone always has access to the most up-to-date assets and knows how to use them correctly.

Connecting your brand guidelines with your DAM gives you extra control regarding how your brand is managed and represented, helping you reduce the risk of brand assets being misused, which can negatively impact your brand image.

PDFs are static documents that reflect information at a specific point in time, and do not show real-time changes, for example if there’s an update to the brand logo or if brand messaging changes.

PDFs are also more difficult to create, maintain, and distribute compared to digital brand guidelines, and you always run the risk that an outdated version is somewhere out there in the world. Making small changes in text or imagery in a PDF is tedious and creates dependencies on other teams or external agencies.

By using Bynder’s Brand Guidelines which are digitized and part of your foundational DAM, everyone has access to the most up-to-date version of all relevant brand elements since the creators of your guidelines can make changes easily and quickly—immediately reflected for all users.