What Actually Goes in a Brand Guidelines Document
There are two ways to get this wrong and they look nothing alike.
The first is the ninety-page brand book with a manifesto, mood photography, and four pages on the philosophy of the colour blue. It costs a fortune, it wins an award, and the people who need it — the agency laying out next month's ads, the new hire building a deck — cannot find the clearspace rule inside it, so they guess.
The second is four slides. Logo, colours, fonts, done. It answers none of the questions that actually come up, so those questions come to you instead, forever, usually as a Slack message that starts "quick one".
A useful document sits between them, and the test for it is simple: could someone you have never met lay out a piece of collateral, correctly, without emailing you? Everything that serves that test belongs in. Most of what does not, does not.
The logo section
This is the part that gets used most, so it goes first. Not after the brand story — first.
Every lockup, shown and named. Primary, stacked, icon, wordmark, tagline version if you have one. Each with a plain sentence on when to use it. If you are unsure what the set should be, logo lockups explained covers the standard arrangements and why scaling one is not a substitute for another.
Clearspace, per lockup, as a diagram. A measurement expressed in a unit derived from the mark — one icon width, one cap height — not a fixed millimetre value that stops meaning anything when the logo is scaled. The clearspace guide has the derivation method.
Minimum size, per lockup, for print and screen separately. Two numbers, tested rather than guessed, with the logo reproduced at actual size on the page so a production person can hold a ruler against it. See setting a minimum size for the twenty-minute test.
Colour variants and their backgrounds. Full colour on light, full colour on dark, one-colour black, one-colour white. Show each against the background it is for, which sounds obvious and is skipped constantly.
Misuse. Six to eight examples, no more. Stretched, recoloured, rotated, drop-shadowed, placed on a busy photo, rebuilt with the wrong typeface. Pick the ones that will actually happen to this brand rather than an exhaustive catalogue of possible sins. Every misuse page is more effective with a red cross on it than with a paragraph explaining the principle.
Construction, optionally. A construction grid page is not needed by the person laying out an ad. It is needed by the next designer, the one who inherits the identity in four years and has to draw a new lockup or extend the system. Include it if the identity will be handed on, and be honest that it is a reference page rather than a usage rule. What a construction grid documents explains what belongs on it.
The colour section
Values for every context, in one table, per colour:
- HEX for screen
- RGB for screen and office software
- CMYK for print
- Pantone if the brand uses spot colour
The thing worth understanding before you write this section is that these are not four spellings of the same colour. A HEX code cannot represent a Pantone ink, and a CMYK conversion of a spot colour is an approximation that will look different on coated and uncoated stock. HEX, RGB, CMYK and Pantone gets into why, but the practical instruction for the document is this: give the printer the Pantone and the CMYK, give the developer the HEX, and state which is authoritative when they disagree.
Then say how the palette is used. A list of six colours with no hierarchy produces layouts where all six appear at equal weight and none of them means anything. Name a primary, name the secondaries, and say what the accent is for. A rough proportion is more useful than it sounds — "roughly sixty percent neutral, thirty percent primary, ten percent accent" gives a non-designer something to aim at.
Accessibility belongs here too. If your accent fails contrast against your background at body-copy size, say so in the document, with the pairing that works instead. Someone will otherwise find out from an audit.
The typography section
Typefaces, weights, and where each is used. Headline face, body face, and the fallback for when neither is available — because someone will be building an email template or a PowerPoint on a machine that has neither licensed.
Say who holds the licence and what it covers. Web fonts and desktop fonts are separately licensed, and the person who discovers the gap is usually a developer, at launch.
A type scale is worth including if the brand produces its own material. Sizes and line heights for headings, body, captions. Whether that scale is expressed in points or a ratio matters less than it existing at all.
Everything else, judged on whether it will be used
Photography direction, illustration style, iconography, tone of voice, motion. Include them when the brand actually produces that kind of material. A company that will never commission a photograph does not need three pages of photographic direction, and including it purely for completeness is how documents get long enough that people stop opening them.
Tone of voice earns its place more often than the others, because more people write for a brand than design for one, and it is cheap to specify: three adjectives, two example sentences showing the difference between on-brand and off, a short list of words to avoid.
Order it by what people need
Use frequency, not narrative arc. The logo section is opened a hundred times for every one time anyone reads the brand story. So:
- Logo and usage
- Colour
- Typography
- Applications and examples
- Everything supplementary
- Brand story and positioning, if it is wanted
Nobody is offended by the story being at the back. Plenty of people are quietly defeated by it being at the front.
Add a contents page with real page numbers, and if the document is a PDF, make the contents clickable. It takes ten minutes and changes whether the thing gets used.
Format and delivery
Deliver the PDF, because the PDF is what gets forwarded. But if you can, also put the logo files where the guidelines are — a shared folder, an intranet page, whatever the client actually uses. Guidelines separated from files means people follow the rules with whatever asset they can find, which is frequently the wrong one. The handoff package and the guidelines should arrive as one thing.
Version it. "Version 1.2, September 2026" on the cover, so that when there are three copies circulating, someone can tell which one is current.
And keep a short summary version — one or two pages, the logo, the colours, the clearspace, the minimum size. That is the file that gets emailed to a printer or a freelancer who needs to do one job correctly and will not read forty pages to do it.
What to leave out
Anything you cannot enforce and nobody will check. Elaborate grid systems for layouts the client will never produce. Rules phrased as principles with no measurement attached — "the logo should always feel spacious" is not a rule, it is a hope.
And resist writing rules for situations that have not arisen. Guidelines grow best by revision, when a real question comes up and the answer gets added. A document that tries to pre-answer everything is a document that takes a year and gets superseded anyway.
Doing this with GridMe
The logo section is the part of a guidelines document that takes the longest to lay out and the part most likely to be rushed. GridMe builds those pages from your artwork: clearspace diagrams with dimension labels, minimum size ladders with the MIN step marked, colour variation sheets with HEX, RGB and CMYK values labelled per swatch, and construction geometry on a locked layer over the mark.
Download GridMe if you would rather spend that time on the parts of the document that need judgement.