How Important Are Brand Guidelines?

1. Protects your brand identity

Brand guidelines safeguard your brand’s integrity by preventing any misuse or distortion of its elements such as a logo or colour palette, ensuring that your brand always represents its core values and image.

Setting standards and rules ensures that anyone creating a message for the brand understands which elements to use and how to apply them effectively.

 2. Consistency builds brand recognition

Brand guidelines help to keep your brand messaging consistent across all touchpoints – from social media and your website to print materials. For your audience, seeing your logo, colour palette and tone of voice all used repeatedly and consistently helps to establish your brand and build trust.

3. Helps with internal alignment

Brand guidelines serve as a reference tool for internal teams, showing employees how to represent the brand consistently and effectively in various contexts. This ensures alignment and clarity within the business. Additionally, when collaborating with external partners, having clear brand guidelines reduces the risk of brand inconsistency or misinterpretation.

1. Logo and logo icon

Your logo has been designed to reflect your brand, values, mission and trajectory – so it’s important to make sure it’s used correctly.

One logo style won’t fit every single use case, so having different versions helps to ensure your branding looks as clean as possible. Some logo variations you might include in your brand guidelines are a horizontal logo, vertical logo, and logo icon in full colour and white.

As well as the specific logo image or icon, it’s important to specify how this should be used across your collateral and communications.

The area indicated around the mark is known as the isolation area. To ensure clarity of the mark, this area should be kept free of any type, photographic, graphic elements or illustrative backgrounds. Additionally, establishing a minimum size ensures that the impact and legibility of the logo is not compromised.

 2. Strapline

It goes without saying, but a brand's strapline should remain the same across all media. Including a section in your brand guidelines stating what your brand strapline is, what it means, and a reminder not to alter this is any way is a good way to ensure consistency. 

For example, our strapline here at Refined Marketing is ‘We create brands to outshine.’ Whether we’re using this in graphics, in our newsletter, or across social media, the phrasing doesn’t change.

3. Colour palette

Colours look different across different mediums, different devices and when alongside different colours, making including your brand's colour palette in your brand guidelines a must. Plus, colours look different to different people, so what one person thinks is a colour match might be completely off to another set of eyes.  

Using HEX, RGB, and CMYK colour codes takes any ambiguity out of using brand colours. A HEX code is a six-digit combination of letters and numbers, representing a colour in digital format. An RGB code represents a colour's mix of red, green and blue, whereas CMYK defines a colour based on its mix of cyan, magenta, yellow and key (black) and is preferred for print materials.  

Our Refined colour palette comprises pink, orange, purple, green, and blue which you can see in HEX, RGB, and CMYK format.

4. Typography

Typography defines a brand’s identity and communicates its personality, conveying its values, messaging, and visual aesthetic to the audience. Typography guidelines for a brand typically include selecting the appropriate typeface, font size, font weight, line spacing, and alignment to be used. A considered choice can enhance a brand’s visibility and recognition. 

Refined’s primary typeface family of fonts is Roboto, which is used across our website, social media, and communications.

5. Imagery and iconography

Visual elements like photography and iconography are strategic tools in your brand guidelines that can convey emotions and values to align with your brand's personality. From choosing preferred headshots to including the specific icons used on your website, it's important to outline how you want your brand to be portrayed visually. 

Here, you can see Refined’s Brand Pillars, the corresponding diagram that is used across our website and social media, and how to make use of some of the colours in our colour palette.

6. Brand voice

Your brand voice encapsulates your brand’s distinct personality, tone, and style in which it communicates – from your website copy to how you interact on social media and everything in-between. This should reflect your brand’s core values and identity, showcased across all touchpoints for your brand.

A strong brand voice helps you to stand out from the crowd, build trust with consumers, and connect with your target audience. Keeping your brand voice consistent builds a stronger brand identity, customer loyalty, and credibility.

As part of CEWB’s brand refresh, we delivered a set of brand guidelines reflecting the new branding materials.

Working with the brand’s newly chosen and retained name, CEWB, our design team created a modern, versatile logo that aligns with their educational mission, while having the flexibility to adapt as the business grows. Additionally, we created a new colour palette, iconography for the brand’s services, brand photography and a brand voice.

The brand guidelines we created for CEWB speaks to this new clean and professional visual identity, reflecting CEWB’s commitment to emotional well-being. These brand guidelines will help to ensure consistency across all visual and written materials, while establishing a clear direction for the brand’s future growth and communications.

Do you need help refining your brand identity?

Let Refined Marketing help you shine – get in touch with our team to see how we can help at letstalk@refinedmarketing.co.uk

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