We create detailed guidelines for your logo, colors, fonts, and messaging to help you create a consistent brand image as you grow.
Brand guidelines provide a single point of strategy and design direction for your team ( leadership, marketing, sales, customer service, design ) and third-parties to create consistent on-brand content. As your company grows, your brand guidelines will help your teams and partners maintain a consistent brand. Your brand guidelines will standardize your colors, fonts, logo usage, brand voice, images, and more to inform your content creation. For guidelines to be helpful, they must be designed to be functional in real world usage. We test all colors, fonts, and graphic elements to make sure they are look good and are appropriate in real design situations.
Brand guidelines are more than just your visual guidelines, they include your messaging and brand strategy fundamentals. We'll work with you through a comprehensive brand strategy process to strengthen your brand's core, positioning, and messaging. Your brand guidelines will include your purpose, values, differentiator, target audience, positioning, messaging and more. This helps align your employees and audience around the same mission and understanding of your brand.
Your brand exists in the minds of your customers. Brand guidelines will ensure that you are creating the right impression of your brand in your customers' minds. Your branding is built on every interaction, from your logo to what words you use to communicate the value you provide. To stand out in the marketplace you need more than just good visual design, you need a strong brand foundation and a consistent application of your brand across all channels.
Maintain consistent messaging and visual design across your teams and third-party partners.
Improve the quality of design across your teams with easy to understand brand guidelines.
Unite your team & third parties with a unified understanding of your brand.
Brand guidelines provide detailed information on all the elements that make up your brand. They typically include visual design information such as guidelines for your colors, fonts, logo usage, icons, graphics, but they can also include your brand strategy and messaging information to create a comprehensive resource to guide all your brand marketing and business decisions. Brand guidelines help your team make consistent on brand content that is aligned with your purpose, values, and positioning.
Early stage startups are still finding their business model and market fit, so there is a high chance that their business will pivot and change, and this often leads to the branding changing. We don't recommend detailed guidelines until you have invested in brand strategy and established clear positioning, messaging, and a path forward for the next few years.
For startups and companies under 50 employees it makes financial sense to use PDF or digital document based guidelines because they are significantly more affordable. For larger companies that have a lot of brand assets and need to maintain a high level of control and access, then web based guidelines are worth the investment. Typically web based guidelines are part of a larger digital asset management system, and for most companies Dropbox works fine for sharing digital assets and brand information.
