I’ve been working on branding projects lately and noticed that brand inconsistency is one of the most common problems—especially when multiple designers or marketers are involved.
From my experience, brand guidelines help maintain consistency by clearly defining:
Logo usage (spacing, size, do’s & don’ts)
Brand colors and color codes
Typography hierarchy
Layout and spacing rules
Tone of voice and visual style
When these rules are documented and followed, branding stays consistent across social media, presentations, print materials, and websites—even when different people work on the same brand.
I’m curious to hear from other designers here:
What sections do you think are must-haves in a brand guideline?
Do you prefer short brand guides or detailed brand manuals?
How do you make sure clients or teams actually follow the guidelines?
Looking forward to your insights and real-world experiences.
What sections do you think are must-haves in a brand guideline?
All the things you listed above, including Pantone coated and uncoated callouts. If you are creating a brand for a physical environment like a store build-out, paint callouts (like Benjamin Moore swatch numbers) are helpful too, though we often match Pantones too. Just having CMYK and Hex is not helpful. Clear-space indicators based on scale rather than size are essential too.
Do you prefer short brand guides or detailed brand manuals?
What you get depends on the nature of the job. I often get one or two page cut sheets that are relevent to the job at hand but on a couple of occasions have been handed a brand manual that was over 100 pages long. The latter requires more back and forth time (ie more billable time.)
How do you make sure clients or teams actually follow the guidelines?
You can’t force a client to use a branding guide you’ve created for them. Depends on their marketing team. As far as your own design team, you reprimand or fire someone who doesn’t follow a guide given to you by a client, unless they have a very good reason and it has been discussed beforehand with the client’s branding team.
You might be interested in this site. You’ll need to create a login. It’s an archive of corporate brand guidelines.
I can advise, but that’s the extent of my authority. If the company has their act together, they’ll have someone with at least a basic level of visual literacy designated as brand manager, and that person has the authority to approve/disapprove work for use.
Every branding project is different, as are every client and their needs, so making a list of what should or shouldn’t be in brand guidelines is a matter of analyzing the organization, its needs, its personality, the audience, its market position, and what is practical for the organization and its budget.
For example, a single-location shop probably doesn’t need anything complicated. A regional restaurant chain needs more to ensure all its locations are recognizable and tightly aligned with the brand. A national brand standard for highway signage can run into hundreds or thousands of pages due to legal, bureaucratic, and safety concerns.
In addition, my personal opinion is that after fully considering the organization’s needs, the brand guidelines should contain just enough, and nothing more. There needs to be enough to provide necessary consistency, while also giving designers the latitude to be creative without unnecessarily restricting their ability to do so through a trove of innovation-inhibiting rules and specifications.
Brand guidelines should provide a stable foundation and framework for the brand. They shouldn’t attempt to fill in all the pieces or place inflexible, counter-productive restrictions that might squelch inspiration and desirable innovation within the brand framework.
Must-haves are logo rules, colors (pantone + hex + CMYK), typography, and tone. keep guides lean — enough to stay consistent but flexible for designers. enforcement comes down to a client-side brand champion and internal accountability.