IxD103 – Week 7 – Brand Guidelines

IxD103 – Week 7 – Brand Guidelines – Content and Review

What are brand guidelines?

A brand style guide is a rulebook that explains how an organisation presents itself to the world through its logo, font and colour selections, photography and much more. Put another way, it’s a reference tool that helps maintain consistency in what a brand looks, feels and sounds like. Using a brand book ensures that a brand looks and feels the same, even when you have different people working on customer service, marketing, design and sales.

Why are brand guidelines so important?

Consistency is one of the main reasons. Lets say you are friends with someone who changes their personality all of the time… You won’t be very familiar with them and it’s also harder to build trust with them. Branding is the exact same! Inconsistency will confuse and alienate your customers. A style guide is important because it helps your business communicate in a consistent way across all teams and channels.

What are the key components of a brand’s identity?

  • Mission
  • Vision
  • Target audience
  • Brand personality
  • Core values

Together, these are the most important things needed to establish your brand identity because they tell the world what you stand for. All the other parts of your brand style guide are tangible elements that communicate those key components to the world through design.

There’s a very useful step by step guide on the website 99designs.co.uk which states 5 steps to creating your brand guidelines in a clear way.

Daniel also introduced us to Brandpad, where you can craft your own brand identities. I think this will be a really good resource I am going to use this week.

We were given the task to research a certain brand and investigate their brand guidelines. I decided to research LUSH, one of my all time favourite brands. I have linked the blog relating to my research down below.

IxD103 – Brand Guidelines Research

Below I have included a Miro Mind map I created, that states a few tips I have picked up from different websites explaining how to make the best out of your brand guidelines.

Mind Map – Frame 1

 

I find Miro boards are a quick way for me to formulate all of my thoughts together. It’s also great because I then get to share them on here after.

My Brand Guidelines…

brand-guidelines

Here is the first version of my brand guideline. I am quite happy with how the guidelines have turned out so far, I know that with time and as my brand develops, I will be able to continue adding different elements.

Leave a Reply