Three reasons to press pause on your brand guidelines

1. You have time to thoroughly test the ground

Whether you’re designing an entirely new brand or refreshing a tired one, it’s important to test out your ideas on a range of touchpoints that are relevant to the brand in question.

Within the B2B tech marketing space there will always be non-negotiables such as the website, internal collateral, long-form content and social media posts. But businesses will also use the new branding in a variety of other ways that you might not have had the time or budget to consider, or that you might not even be aware of. Perhaps it needs to be used for event materials, video animation or co-branded case studies? Maybe it will be making an appearance on T-shirts, bags or billboards?

As you begin to roll out the new identity, the full range of deliverables to which it must be applied should become apparent relatively quickly. And, if you’ve pressed pause on solidifying the identity in brand guidelines, the design team still has some freedom to experiment.

Of course this doesn’t mean changing the colour palette or typeface you’ve agreed on. But it could mean expanding the visual identity so that it elegantly covers the touchpoints you haven’t considered during the initial project. You’re able to test where the identity bends and breaks without having that nagging feeling in the back of your mind that ‘this doesn’t fit within the guidelines’.

When you do get to the stage of developing a set of guidelines for sign-off, you’ll have a far more comprehensive and realistic list of deliverables to include and to provide guidance for.

2. You can determine where brand guidelines should live

Brand guidelines can be created in multiple formats, each with their own pros and cons. Pausing between the initial branding project and creating the guidelines will give you time to understand how the branding is being used and determine the most appropriate format. Let’s take a look at some of the options:

Option one: PDF 

Creating brand guidelines in PDF format is the go-to route. You can take inspiration from endless examples of PDF brand guidelines at Branding Style Guides and Are.na.

Pros: Brand guidelines in PDF format are easy for everyone to access as there are no specific logins or licences required, so they are fairly simple to share with staff or external collaborators. There are no hidden costs other than regular updates.

Cons: All assets are static, and you will require some form of hub to access logos, fonts and image libraries. PDF guidelines can also be labour-intensive to build out, populate and update.

Option two: Online templates 

There are various online templates available for brand guidelines. Some of the more popular ones right now are Frontify, Brandpad and Standards.

Pros: Brand guideline templates are quick and simple to update, and most include an online hub where you can store all your assets. They make it easy to showcase motion and movement as part of the brand, and they are designed to share with teams and collaborators.

Cons: The downside of online templates is that they require logins, user accounts and hosting, all of which adds to the cost. In addition you’re very much reliant on the internet to access them.

Option three: Bespoke hubs

A third option is to develop a bespoke hub for brand guidelines. Brands that have taken this approach include Zendesk, Dropbox and Noom.

Pros: Creating a bespoke hub gives you complete freedom and flexibility.  All assets can be made downloadable, and it’s easy to showcase motion and movement. The bespoke development adds emphasis and marks the importance of the guidelines.

Cons: A bespoke hub will require considerable time to build, and updating it may require extra design and development resources. In addition, while it’s not necessarily a requirement, all the examples we’ve seen have been public facing.

Option four: Print

Printed brand guidelines are an option to consider and they do look beautiful. Older examples include the Nasa, New York City Transit and EPA guidelines, while a more recent addition is for the Uber brand.

Pros: Printed guidelines make a big statement, especially if they are made into a professional brand book. They are easy to explore and have as a reference point, but they would usually be used alongside another digital format.

Cons: Producing printed guidelines is labour-intensive, and they will take time to build out, populate, and maintain, making this an expensive option. Updating them will also be a very slow process due to the need to reprint.

3. You can tailor the guidelines to the users’ needs 

There’s no set way to do brand guidelines, and every agency I’ve worked for in the past has framed them slightly differently. Some had a standard template and a specific set of elements to include, some would copy other guidelines they’d found on the internet, and some would take months to complete, obsessing over the minute details.

Ultimately, I think the phrase ‘different strokes for different folks’ is quite apt. Rather than taking a ‘this is how we do guidelines’ approach, it makes sense to consider the people that will actually be using them, and then work out what they would find most useful. By taking a pause after the initial design process you have time to talk to the teams who will be using the guidelines and find out  what they would like to be included, what format would work for them, and how they would like the guidelines presented.

Things to ask about when you’re determining what to include in the guidelines might be:

• Should the guidelines document mission, vision and purpose?
• Should the guidelines cover the company’s positioning and messaging?
• Should the guidelines display boilerplate copy examples?
• What’s the balance of dos and don’ts?
• How much motion needs to be displayed?
• Are there specific execution examples needed (these could be ad examples for the internal marketing team, or app icons for the product team)?