Brand Design Guidelines: Essential Brand Visual Standards

Many designers and creative professionals often overlook the value of brand design guidelines (which are also known as brand bibles or a part of them). In fact, brand design guidelines provide a clear set of criteria that specify the exact presentation style of marketing materials both online and offline.

Style guidelines have numerous advantages. They can save you time and money, reduce frustration at work, and make the maintenance and creation of marketing materials much more convenient. You can think of it as a detailed instruction manual that not only provides specific implementation instructions but sometimes also offers in-depth explanations of the reasons behind them.

If you're not sure whether every brand and company in each service needs it, or you don't know how to create it, then keep reading.

Why Every Brand Should Have Design Guidelines

For small companies or those with only one designer, brand design guidelines may seem dispensable. But in reality, every brand should develop style and brand guidelines to ensure that all the visual elements of its products remain consistent.

Take a company with only one designer as an example. Suppose you are the only designer in the company's projects, responsible for designing the company's logo, business cards, and all other marketing materials, and you are familiar with all the design elements.

However, a year later, the company has doubled in size, and you need to hire another designer to share the workload. Here comes the problem. You have to rely on your memory to teach your new colleague the brand's design specifications, which include many details that you haven't paid attention to in the past year.

If some important information isn't conveyed properly, the company is likely to blame you for not training the new employee well.

But if there is a design guideline that covers all the necessary information such as colors, logo size and placement, and font usage, things will be much easier.

Another example is if you are a freelancer serving multiple clients. The design guideline can help you easily review the works you completed months or even years ago without having to rummage through old files to find the specific font used or the hexadecimal color values of the colors. You just need to open one file, and you can immediately obtain all the information you need.

The design guideline can also ensure that your works won't be ruined by newly hired and inexperienced designers, as they may not understand your design intentions. You surely don't want your carefully designed logo to be shrunk too small or placed too close to other elements, thus weakening its impact (even worse, the white space between elements is completely disrupted).

Creating design guidelines for every brand you serve can not only make your work easier but also make the style of your works more consistent, making all visual presentations look more professional. At the beginning of a project, creating a basic set of design guidelines won't take much time, but it can save you a great deal of follow-up work and prevent you from encountering endless troubles during the work process.