Why Does Your Business Need Good Brand Guidelines?

Although we work in a very creative industry a lot of our day to day work is very technical. Part of a design agency's job is to make sure that a client's brand remains consistent even when it is not directly involved in a project.

If you have invested in a new logo and gone through a branding exercise, you don't want all the hard work undermined by varying shades of company colours, incorrect typefaces and distorted logo's appearing over social media and your marketing materials.

To guard against this happening, it is important to have comprehensive brand guidelines to let third parties know about such things as approved colour pallets, specific fonts, minimum logo size etc.

A good logo must work across all marketing channels. It must be as effective on a flyer as it is on a web page. Careful consideration is therefore given to proportional size, fonts and colours and documented in your brand guides.

However the logo is used, it must always be recognisable. There may be occasions when the colours vary or only certain elements are used but as long as the guidelines are adhered to the logo will remain consistent and the brand won't be diluted.

If you think of any globally famous brand you are able to instantly recognise their logo no matter how it is displayed.

The colours may vary, the medium may vary it might even look slightly different but it is actually always, somehow, the same.

You can safely bet that Coca Cola's brand guidelines are pages and pages long and cover every possible eventuality as to what is and what is not allowable. It is this attention to detail that has ensured that the brand has remained strong and relevant.

No matter what the size of business, the basic principles of building a brand stay the same. Even if your company's ambition is only to be recognised in the local area, a high level of consistency is still required to engage your target customers.

A good design agency will always provide you with a set of brand guidelines when you commission them to design your logo.

The level of detail doesn't need to be anywhere near as comprehensive as a global brand. In fact, they should be clear and easy to follow as they are the building blocks of your brand.

If you are interested in having a look at a few examples of brand guidelines drawn up by Ovy Design you can find them here.

It may be a dry subject and it is not one that would immediately spring to mind when considering employing a design agency, but the technical side of the design process is every bit as important for a projects success as the creative side.

Get the basics right and your brand will develop alongside your business. Providing the strong and recognisable identity essential for prosperity. Don't leave it to chance make sure that everything is in place from the start.