What is a brand guidelines document, and what goes in it?

What is a corporate identity?

A corporate identity is the set of visual and verbal decisions that make a brand recognisable as the same brand everywhere: logo, colours, typefaces, imagery, tone of voice, and the rules for using them.

The logo is only the signature of that whole. What lets you recognise the same brand on a business card, a website and a social post is usually less the logo than the consistency of colour, type and composition.

What are brand guidelines for?

Brand guidelines are where those decisions are written down. They have one job: to let anyone who uses the brand make the right call without having to ask the designer. A printer, a social media manager, a developer or someone who joins six months from now looks at the same document and reaches the same answer.

Without guidelines, every new piece starts from zero: colours drift, the logo gets stretched, and each channel looks like a slightly different brand.

What goes into brand guidelines?

Scope depends on the brand, but good guidelines usually cover these sections:

Logo

• The main logo and its variations: horizontal, stacked, emblem only.
• Clear space: the room that stays empty around the logo.
• Minimum size: on screen and in print.
• Use on light and dark backgrounds, single-colour versions.
• Misuse: stretching, rotating, adding shadows, changing the colour.

Colour

Screen (HEX, RGB) and print (CMYK) values for each colour, and a Pantone match where needed. More important still, each colour's share and role: which is the background, which is the accent, which is used sparingly?

Typography

Which typefaces, which weights, heading and text sizes, line spacing. A fallback font for places where the typeface can't load, such as email.

Imagery

How photographs, illustrations, 3D or graphic elements are chosen and cropped. What a composition allows and what it doesn't.

Motion

If the brand lives on screens, how the logo and elements move is part of the identity too: entrance and exit timings, rhythm, things that are off-limits.

Tone of voice

How does the brand speak? Short, formal, playful? A few right and wrong example sentences often help more than long explanations.

Applications

Business card, letterhead, presentation template, social media templates, email signature, signage. Rules are easiest to understand through examples.

Example: the Creaphic identity system v1

We built the first version of our own identity this way. Version 1 of the Creaphic identity includes:

• Logo variations: the sun emblem and wordmark we already had, unchanged.
• Palette: sunrise #FF6535, graphite #20211F and paper #F5F4EF at the core, with a selective horizon blue and mist grey.
• Typography: Plus Jakarta Sans for headlines and text, IBM Plex Mono for short technical notes.
• Motion rules: one dominant gesture per scene; entrances 900–1400 ms, settling 300–500 ms, at least 1500 ms to read. No endlessly spinning logos, no sound that starts on its own. Details on the motion principles page.
• A print rule: the emblem may bleed, the signature may not. Applied in the print and stationery study.
• First applications: business cards, posters and the social system.

We also added a second voice: a character language. We wrote down plainly that it doesn't replace the main identity and works as a second voice in social content and campaigns. Boundaries like that are often the most useful sentences in a set of guidelines.

How much does a small business need?

Not every brand needs a hundred-page manual. For a new shop or a one-person business, this is usually enough:

1. The logo and two variations, with clear space and minimum size.
2. Three or four colours, with their codes.
3. One or two typefaces.
4. Three example applications: a business card, a social post, a sign or poster.

The guidelines grow as the brand grows. What matters is that there is one current version from day one.

PDF or web page?

Either works. A PDF is easy to share and can go straight to a printer; a web page is easy to keep current and lets people download files directly. Whichever you choose, make sure old versions don't stay in circulation.

Getting guidelines made

Creaphic is a creative studio from Iğdır, Türkiye, and we work on identities and guidelines with brands everywhere. If you want to build a system around the logo you already have, or start from scratch, write to info@creaphic.com. If you're curious about the logo side, our logo design guide is a good place to start.

The scope of our identity work is on the logo and brand identity design page; for how an identity lives on social media, see our post on social media design.