A brand guideline was something I didn’t have any experience in before this project. So, to get myself more informed about what it is and what is included and also how other companies had approached their own guidelines, I carried out some research before I started planning and designing my own brand guidelines.
A brand guideline is basically a rulebook for how a company wants to present itself to the world. This includes the logo, font, colour and imagery. It is a tool to maintain consistency for how the brand will look, but also how it sounds and makes the audience feel. It ensures the brand will look the same, no matter who is working on it or where, from marketing to sales to designs.
The brand identity is the company’s personality. It will be how the world recognises you and learns to trust you. Inconsistency can confuse and alienate the brand’s customers. A guideline allows the company to communicate in a consistent way across all features and channels.
The five main components are: mission, vision, target audience, brand personality and core values. The mission and vision is shown through the brand’s mission statement and deciding where the brand plans to go. It is important those using the guidelines know who the target audience is, so they can design accordingly. Coming up with a number of adjectives to describe the brand will help set the tone for the design and writing within the brand. These may be seem small and could be overlooked, but they build good foundations for a set of brand guidelines.
To cover a company’s brand identity, the guidelines should include the brand’s:
logos
colour palette
typography
other imagery
voice and tone
Each of these should be broken down further, explaining all the different elements within these topics.
To help me visually see how my brand guidelines would look, I looked at a few examples including Uber, Leinster Rugby, Urban Outfitters and Audi.
I liked the simplicity of the layout and design of the Leinster Rugby guidelines. Also, how there is consistency and how the design is considered so that it also fits in with the brand overall. This includes the colour scheme and font. Also the layout and order of the guidelines is very easy to follow.
The use of colour and imagery in Urban Outfitters guidelines is what stood out to me. It really visually speaks about the brand and the tone/mood it wants to create. Even the small details of how the text breaks the edges to the alignment reflects how their clothing wants to break status quo and be unique.
Simple and professional is how I would describe Audi’s brand guidelines and that’s what I find most appealing about it. It really suits a car brand as it shouldn’t be overly flashing to busy, unlike UO, as the clientele are completely different. This is reflective of the presentation design across all boards within the company.
Before I began constructing my brand guidelines, I quickly sketched out the order I wanted my pages to go in. It was using my research that I took inspiration from a few different sources and combined them together to create my own set of brand guidelines. I wanted the design of document to also reflect my brand and that it would be visually recognisable that it was for Yello. My aim was to create consistency throughout as well so that it ended with a professional feel. I decided I was going to approach my brand guidelines in a design approach and act as if every page was a way to promote the brand.
After I decided on the layout, I created small wireframes of how I wanted each page to look before I moved to Figma to digitise them. This allowed me to plan and break up the larger aspects like typography so that it is easier for the reader to take in. I wanted it to have a very minimalist look so that the main focus was on the information. This type of design is something I want to carry over into my app and webpage design, due to the fact my chosen colour scheme is quite bright and loud.
The last step of creating my brand guidelines was collating all the design work I have been working on and organising it into sections and pages on Figma and adding a small explanation on each. To make sure it is visually consistent and in proportion, I used the grid layout tool on Figma to make sure all my spacing is accurate and the text and imagery is in proportion with each other.
