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Published 16 October 2026 · Updated 21 October 2026 · By TMF — The Media Foundry
Brand guidelines (also called a brand book or brand style guide) are the rulebook for how your business looks and sounds. They exist for one practical reason: the people who make your marketing change all the time. A new designer joins, a printer needs artwork, a freelancer edits a reel, an influencer asks for your logo. Without written rules, each of them makes their own guess, and over a year those guesses add up to a brand that looks like five different companies. This guide covers what to include in brand guidelines, in the order we use on our brand identity projects, and how to keep the document short enough that people actually read it.
Start with who the guidelines are for
Before writing a single page, list the people who will use the document: in-house staff, outside designers, video editors, web developers, printers, sales teams and partners. Each of them needs different things. A developer wants exact colour codes and font files; a sales executive wants to know which logo to drop into a proposal. Good guidelines answer each group's question on one page and point them to the files they need. If a section does not help anyone make a decision, leave it out.
1. Brand foundation
Open with a short statement of what the brand is: who you serve, what you offer, what makes you different, and the personality you want people to feel. Keep it to one page. This is not a mission-statement exercise; it is the yardstick every later rule is measured against. When someone asks “can we use this bright neon template?”, the foundation page should make the answer obvious.
2. Logo usage
The logo section is the one people open most, so make it the clearest. Include:
- Every approved version — primary, horizontal, stacked, icon-only, and single-colour versions for dark and light backgrounds.
- Clear space — the minimum empty area around the logo, usually defined using a part of the logo itself so it scales.
- Minimum size — the smallest the logo can appear on screen and in print before details are lost.
- Misuse examples — stretched, recoloured, rotated, outlined, placed on busy photos. Showing what not to do prevents more mistakes than describing what to do.
- File formats — which file to use where: vector files for print and signage, PNG or SVG for web, and a version sized for social media profile pictures.
3. Colour palette
List primary and secondary colours with the codes each supplier needs: HEX and RGB for screens, CMYK for print, and a Pantone reference if you print brand colours on packaging or merchandise. Then say how the colours are used together — which is dominant, which is for accents, and which background colours are allowed. A palette without proportions usually ends up with the accent colour everywhere.
4. Accessible colour combinations
Many brand books skip this, and it causes problems on websites and in social graphics. The W3C's WCAG contrast guidance sets a minimum contrast ratio of 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text (at least 18 point, or 14 point bold). List which text-and-background pairs from your palette pass, and mark the pairs that should never carry body text. It saves arguments later and makes your website easier to use for everyone, which also ties into our small business website checklist.
5. Typography
Name the typefaces for headings and body text, the weights you use, and a simple hierarchy: heading sizes, body size, line spacing and how to set captions or quotes. Include web-safe fallbacks and say where the font files or licences live. Font licensing is easy to overlook: some fonts are licensed for desktop use only, and using them on a website or in an app can need a separate licence, so record what your licence covers.
6. Imagery and graphic elements
Describe the photography style in plain words — natural light or studio, real people or products, candid or posed — and show a handful of good and bad examples. Do the same for illustrations, icons, patterns and any graphic devices that recur across your work. If you produce your own photos and video, this section becomes the creative brief for every shoot; our content production team works from exactly this kind of page.
7. Voice and tone
Your brand voice is how you sound in writing, and it needs as much definition as your colours. A useful format is three or four voice traits, each with a short explanation, a “we are / we are not” pair, and a before-and-after example. Then explain how tone shifts by situation: a launch post can be playful, a complaint reply should be calm and direct. Add a short word list covering how you write your company name, product names, and terms you avoid.
8. Social media rules
Social is where brands drift fastest, because content is made quickly and by many hands. Cover profile picture and cover image specs, how the logo appears on reels and stories, caption style, hashtag use, and how to reply to comments. If you work with creators, include how they may show your product and logo, and remind them that paid or gifted collaborations need clear disclosure under the ASCI rules explained in our influencer disclosure guide. For day-to-day execution, our social media marketing service follows the same rules.
9. Applications and templates
Show the brand applied to the things you actually produce: social post and story templates, a presentation template, email signature, business cards, invoices, signage, packaging and website components. Real examples teach faster than abstract rules, and editable templates stop people building new layouts from scratch. For web, link the guidelines to your site's design system so buttons, forms and headings stay consistent with your website design.
10. Ownership, files and updates
End with the practical details: who owns the brand and approves exceptions, where the master files live, how suppliers request access, and the date of the current version. If you have registered trade marks, note how they should be shown; the Office of the Controller General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks is the official source for trade mark registration in India. Review the document at least once a year, and whenever you launch a new product line or change your positioning.
How long should brand guidelines be?
There is no correct page count. A local business may need ten clear pages; a company with several product lines and many suppliers may need fifty. The test is whether a new designer can produce on-brand work on their first day without calling you. If they cannot, something is missing. If nobody opens the document, it is probably too long or too abstract, and a one-page summary at the front can fix that.
Common mistakes to avoid
- A PDF nobody can find. Keep one shared location, linked from your onboarding notes and supplier briefs.
- Rules without files. Every rule should point to the asset that makes it easy to follow.
- Only the logo. A logo sheet is not brand guidelines; voice, imagery and templates matter just as much.
- Frozen in time. Brands evolve. Version the document and record what changed.
Next step
If you already have a logo but no guidelines, start with sections 2, 3, 5 and 7 — logo, colour, type and voice — and add the rest as you produce more material. If the identity itself needs work, our brand identity service builds the identity and the guidelines together, so the rules come from the strategy rather than being written after the fact. If new guidelines are part of a wider change of name or identity, use our rebranding checklist to plan the rollout, and link the finished guidelines from every creative brief you send to designers and agencies.