What is a corporate branding guidelines pdf?
In the simplest form, a corporate branding guidelines pdf contains your company logo, font and colours. It is used to ensure consistency between all your business and marketing materials.
Why do I need a corporate branding guideline pdf?
You can pass this pdf onto a worker so they know what font and colour to use. It is that simple. Using only fonts and colours from the PDF will make sure that new materials match the old ones. If you ever update fonts and colours (or get a new or refreshed logo) these should get reflected in your corporate branding guideline pdf. It is super important that this document be the place where workers (or contractors/agencies) go to for branding information and it must remain up to date.
How simple can the brand guide be?
Font, colour, logo. It can be that simple. It can be a single page!
How complex can the corporate branding guidelines pdf be?
This depends on your brand. If your brand is an umbrella with multiple companies and many offices outsourcing to many agencies: you are likely to have more of a brand bible. Also, a big brand guide can contain over 100 pages! In a big brand guide, there is rules on just about anything the brand creates. For uniformity across all team, it makes sense to have a complex brand guide detailing exactly how everything is to look. It saves guess work. And it is easy to see when comparing to the brand guide if a new item is “on brand” or not.
What to include?
All the big brand bibles will include certain pages/information. For example:
- Different logo formats (vertical, horizontal, single colour, black and white version)
- Image style choice
- Graphic elements used with your brand
- Stationery (business cards, letterheads, pens)
- Promo items (t-shirts, banners, car banner)
- Documents (reports, brochures, quotes)
Depending on how uniformed you want all the future materials to be, you might consider also including exact font sizes for headings, sub headings, body copy.
Needing a brand guideline
You might say, “but I have been running my business for years and never needed a brand guideline.” While this might be true, there are good reasons for need a corporate brand guideline now. The main reason is to do with scaling the business and hiring people to take over creating new materials. With instructions, it is easy for anybody to create new materials. Probably the most common service provider you will have to share these with is the website developer and graphic design agency. They will want to make sure they follow your brand. And if you don’t have one already, then the graphic design agency will want create one for you. By doing this, rules will be set about what your brand will look like going into the future. You can send them a huge range of materials and they will distil that down to the rules.
