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Brand Book

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Did you know that coherent branding generates a 23% increase in annual revenue? 

Perhaps surprisingly, despite obvious benefits, only a quarter of all the companies out there have and use formal branding guidelines. These are usually specified in a brand manual (or ‘brand book’, or ‘brand guideline’). Nevertheless, 60% of the same companies state that their branding materials are always in line with the brand’s visual identity and design guidelines. The reason for this disparity is that a brand book aims to create standard uses. On the other hand, in day-to-day communication, you may come across particular cases that require particular decisions that are not mentioned in the brand book. But still, how can you be so sure you are in line with the brand guidelines, when you don’t have the guidelines per se, and actual standards to compare to?

Owning and implementing the brand book guidelines help companies reach the coherence they need for recognition and memorability.

If you own a small company, you may think that a brand book is not that important. What we think is that any brand should have this guide to make sure that all its visuals are aligned.

For example, let’s assume that the only designer in your company is you. You design all the visuals – logo, website, brochure, business card. So you know by heart all the assets and all the corresponding rules.

Now, let’s say that many years from now you hire a second designer to split the workload. You have the responsibility to train this person for her job. Will you do it orally, like a Shaolin master?

Wouldn’t it be much easier to hand over a brand book that contains all she needs to know? What colors to use and to what end, what size the business cards should be, where to place the logo on a layout, what is the suitable text size, and so on. A brand book makes it a lot easier and safer for a designer. It shows creative ways of using the visual assets of the brand, and more importantly, it shows what not to do, in order to keep your brand safe from unfortunate applications. If Coca-Cola didn’t have a brand book, then its logo might have been printed in one hundred shades of red. We owe the iconic Coca-Cola red to the consistent use of a brand book.

Having a brand book does not limit creativity. Instead, the brand book sets some rules for coherent use of the brand’s visuals in communicating with its audience.

Practically the brand book contains the brand story and the rules of brand implementation: logo usage, font, corporate colors, and outlines for brand communication. A visual identity manual is also useful for maintaining visual coherence for brand implementation across various media.

What is a brand book?

A brand book is a set of standards and instructions related to the brand’s identity: visual identity, tone of voice, and communication strategy. The brand book actually specifies what your brand should wear when leaving home, how it should talk, whether it should be friendly or stiff, what and how to communicate at a certain moment in its existence.

Call it brand manual, brand guidelines, brand standards, or style guide, the brand book is that mandatory document that regulates the manifestation of the brand’s visual identity. It is also a guideline for using the visual identity according to a well-defined set of rules for positioning the brand, and for communicating it to its audience. When needed, the same brand may communicate and manifest itself differently in certain pre-defined areas.

You should bear in mind that the brand book is an instrument both for external and internal use. It should be used by designers for various visual implementations, but also by printing shops that produce the brand’s business cards, brochures, catalogs, etc. Depending on the industry, the brand book may include more or fewer chapters. The important thing is to exhaust as many of the possible applications of the visual identity as possible.

The brand book is a living instrument. You have to update it continuously (at least annually) to keep up with your brand, which is ever-evolving. Your brand uses new media channels, and new communication tactics, and so it needs new rules for consistent implementation.

Why is the brand book necessary?

The greatest advantage of owning a brand manual is to provide consistency and coherence to your company. It also makes the daily activity of the marketing department more efficient.

Being coherent in what your company communicates through visuals or texts sets the business tone of voice, personality, and overall corporate identity.

In the long run, all these help maintain the trust and loyalty of your target audience. Frequent changes in design for the sake of being creative and new might make the brand seem confusing and inconsistent, which dilutes the brand’s identity and reliability.

Besides projecting a unified image, a brand book may contribute to establishing and promoting a unified corporate culture and identity. This helps improve the employee retention rate. Brand books also play a major part in the corporate life of companies with more than one office building. And it comes in handy for brands that contract several print suppliers.

What’s inside a brand book?

A brand book is a communication tool that specifies all there is to know about the brand’s identity for actual or potential partners, suppliers, and employees. This goes for both verbal and visual brand identities.

The brand book may focus on the design, chromatics, typography, or on communicating the brand externally vs. internally. A good brand book has it all.

The brand book needs to be phrased as a set of rules for the team that implements brand communication while leaving enough room for creativity. The rules are there to enforce and protect the brand’s identity. It is important, though, to be formulated in such a way as not to make the designers feel constrained. Designers don’t like that and you need them in good spirits!

What goes in a brand book:

  • brand definition;
  • verbal identity marks;
  • visual identity marks;
  • short-term and long-term communication strategy (or both);
  • industry-specific offline brand applications;
  • online brand applications.

The brand definition should function as a brief introduction to the evolution of the brand identity over the years.

We even have famous brand book examples:

  • Skype
  • Swedish Armed Forces
  • Nike Football
  • Foursquare
  • Unicef
  • Adobe
  • Mozilla

The logo: its function and its relationship to other visual elements

A brand book should specify how to make sure that your logo stays consistent throughout various media. The brand book should also present all the accepted versions of the logo and their uses on various layouts.

Why is that necessary? Because it often happens that logos are resized or their shape and color are somehow altered.

Most of the brands use slightly different variations of the logo for different backgrounds: colorful, black and white, for web, for print, portrait, or landscape. Without rigorous specifications of colors, sizes, and formats for all the logo accepted versions, a designer will have a hard time sorting out and keeping track of all the details.

A correctly built visual identity contributes to building a durable brand. With the help of the brand book, there will be no doubt about what the logo should look like in various contexts. The lack of a brand book will cause visual chaos in the visual expressions of the logo and overall visual identity.

The chromatic palette of the brand

A well-defined brand has a coherent chromatic palette that makes it immediately recognizable through the use of primary and secondary colors.

Not regulating the brand chromatics affects the uniqueness, the recognisability, and awareness. In a brand book or identity manual, the colors used for the graphic display of the brand, as well as the respective color codes in RGB, CMYK, etc. are rigorously specified.

For example, we associate Coca-Cola with red, Facebook with blue, Apple with black and white with a touch of grey, and so on. The brand book should dictate clearly what colors are to be used in order to comply with the corporate brand identity.

The font family

The brand typeface brings order and accuracy to written and visual communication.

Using the correct typeface for expressing visual identity works in favor of clearly communicating the information, creating a unified and hopefully unique visual identity. 

Using more typefaces than necessary, as well as using irregular text sizes and text positions throughout the layout will result in visual untidiness and will affect the quality of the design.

The layout

Any brand should employ well-defined layouts to communicate its messages. A set of composition rules should specify clearly the accepted ratio of text to visual in a layout.

The lack of coherence and unity in various layouts dilutes drastically the favorable impact that a brand aims to make on its audience through its visual identity. 

The imagery (photographic style)

The brand’s photographic style has the function of differentiating the brand through its visual manifestations and associations. Powerful imagery makes the brand stand out through rational choices of chromatics and composition, as well as emotions and feelings conveyed by the photos.

The lack of a photographic, compositional, and emotional style may confuse the audience interacting with the brand and may even cause unwanted associations with other brands.

Iconography: brand-specific icons, pictograms, signs, and symbols

A set of icons, pictograms, signs, and distinctive symbols facilitates the transmission of information in a clear and simple manner. Not a nice to have, but a must, in the digital age.

Iconography is useful in media that offer little space for visual expression. The lack of a brand iconographic style hinders the processing of information and drives off the reader.

The supergraphic

The supergraphic is, besides the logo, the most important visual identifier of the brand.

A well-built supergraphic rounds off the visual identity of the brand and may be used by itself in contexts where the logo is not appropriate. Its function is to trigger brand associations. It may be derived from the logo or complement the logo.

The lack of a supergraphic lessens a brand image. It gives the feeling of an unfinished and undefined project.

What goes in a brand book brief?

When you ask for a brand book, we assume that your brand identity is well rounded off and you’re in search of rules of use. that means you have the logo, the primary and secondary colors, the supergraphic, typefaces, imagery, and various layouts for brand materials.

If all these already exist, it means you’re after specific definitions and rules of use for your brand identity, by developing a brand book. This is a separate project, with separate timing, separate teams, and budget.

For efficiency the a brand book brief should contain some data on the business itself:

  • a clear specification of the industry, so that the consultant may suggest from the start deliverables that are suitable for the category;
  • the age or how long the brand has been on the market;
  • materials already used in communicating with clients and partners;
  • advertising materials used in attracting new customers;
  • examples of materials that you don’t have but wish to produce;
  • the deadline for the brand book.

When do you need a brand book?

If you wish to invest in a healthy business, you should have a brand book right from the start. If your management is very centralized and you as a decision-maker have the luxury to ‘ok’ all the communication assets that spring from the company then you’re the brand book.

While your business grows and you need to print all sorts of materials (business cards, flyers, posters, and other materials) in at least two different cities, then you should regulate all the visual assets. What type of paper should be used, what colors, what business card template – all these need to be specified. Two different types of paper absorb the ink differently, so you’ll have two different looks for your business cards.

Let’s say you’re a chain store. Unit managers need to produce daily promotion posters, so they better have a minimum set of rules to get it right. You don’t want your chain posters look like Bauhaus in one store, and rococo in the next.

How to make a brand book? Creative process

The brand book is not just a design project, it is also a strategic one. Why? When you need to communicate the same message to different audiences, you have to choose the visuals that are appropriate for your segmented audiences. This requires a good deal of teamwork from designers, strategists, copywriters, and proofreaders.

The brand book project may start only after the visual identity has been approved. From then on, you begin to build the brand book according to your strategic priorities, setting up your online and offline brand applications, the brand tone of voice, and communication strategy.

The next step after applications are developed is to create the brand book template. First, define the brand book content. Then introduce the already developed applications and elaborate their definitions.

Generally speaking, the stages of the creative process are:

  • strategy: define the brand book contents
  • collect: all the applications that go in the brand book
  • prep: establish ground rules of use for the visual identity components
  • production: we implement the brand book graphics, introduce the visuals and explain the rules of use
  • presentation: we present the brand book, explain our choices, and send the print files.

After all the brand applications have been developed, the designer and the copywriter fine-tune the definitions and the visual examples. 

A brand book is the bible of any brand, so it is uniques and custom-made for that brand in particular. This shows both in the visuals and in the tone of voice of the definitions and rules.

In conclusion, a brand should have its own visual manifestation ground, its own graphic, chromatic, photographic, and iconographic style. The lack of any of the above will eventually lead to a bland, weak expression of the brand, making it incapable to stand out from the competition, by powerfully and consistently expressing its philosophy.

How often should you update your brand book?

The brand book should reflect your present and future needs. It is a living instrument and has to stay up to date. therefore, we recommend updating the brand book at least annually. That is because your brand evolves, it uses new media channels and new media communication tactics. All these require new rules of use for coherent and consistent brand communication.

Do you need a Brand Book?

Let’s talk about your project here