Branding
What belongs in brand guidelines (and what is padding)
A guide nobody opens is a design cost with no return. The eight pages that get used, and the forty that do not.
Most brand guidelines are too long to be read and too vague to be followed. The test is simple: could a competent person who has never met you produce a correct social post, a slide and a print ad using only this document? If not, it is decoration.
The pages that get used
- The mark and its clear space. Primary version, the variants, the minimum size, and what must not happen to it. Three or four "do not" examples beat a paragraph of prose.
- Colour with roles, not just values. Not "here are six colours" but "this is the background, this is the text, this is the one accent, use it once per screen". Include HEX, RGB, CMYK and, if anything will be printed at volume, a Pantone reference.
- Type scale. Two faces at most, with sizes and line heights for headline, subhead, body and caption. A scale removes the daily argument about how big a heading should be.
- Contrast rules. Which colour pairs are allowed on top of each other. This is where most brands quietly fail accessibility.
- Photography direction. Six images that are right and three that are wrong. Faster and clearer than any adjective.
- Voice, with examples. Not "friendly yet professional" — that describes every company on earth. Write the same sentence three ways and mark which one is yours.
- Templates. The social sizes, the letterhead, the slide master. People follow a template; they rarely follow a PDF.
- Contacts and files. Where the assets live and who to ask. One line that saves twenty emails.
The padding
The moodboard from month one. The "brand story" written for an internal audience. Fifteen pages of logo misuse examples. A colour palette with eleven colours and no hierarchy. Anything that describes a feeling without showing a decision.
Format matters more than length
A twelve-page PDF that lives in a shared folder gets used. A ninety-page PDF gets opened once. If your team works in Figma or Canva, put the guidelines where the work happens and keep the PDF as the archive copy.
The point of a guide is to remove decisions, not to document taste. Every page that does not remove a decision is a page you paid for and nobody will read.
Working on something like this?
Tell us what you are building — we reply to every enquiry.