What are brand standards?
Brand standards are a set of rules and guidelines that protect the look and feel of your organization. It provides a standardized approach to creative work in order to uphold the integrity of the brand. Simply put, the brand standards are far more important than the logo itself.
What is included in brand standards?
The staples of a brand standards manual include rules around: logo use, fonts, colors, and imagery. However, great brand standards go beyond these basics to provide even more clarity and uniformity to the brand.
Things to consider in your brand standards include:
Logo use: When and where should the logo be used? Does the logo need a certain amount of space around it to breathe? Should various color versions of the logo and their use be specified?
Fonts: Which fonts can be used and where? Determining headline, subheading and body fonts are key to keeping your creatives on brand. And, be sure to specify when you can use bold, italics and light fonts.
Colors: What colors can you use in creatives and how can they be used? Specifying a color palette with defined hex codes can keep everything recognizable and branded.
Voice & tone: How does your brand sound? Are you serious? Funny? Informative? Depicting the tone and voice of your brand can keep captions and copy cohesive no matter who the writer may be,
Graphic elements: If your brand has a symbol in conjunction with your logo, when and where can it be used?
These are just a few of the options to include in your brand standards. Again, the more detail you give your brand, the more consistency you can keep within your company. It’s a great tool to help graphic designers and your team both short and long term.
Why do I need brand standards?
CONSISTENCY! Brand standards help define how your brand is portrayed to audiences. It gives direction to your marketing team, especially graphic designers and social media teams. In determining how your creative looks and sounds, you can keep a cohesive vision no matter how many people are involved in your company. But remember, you can’t stop there, the brand standards are nothing more than wasted time and trees if you are not enforcing the standards every single day on every single project, communication or any other effort set forth by the organization.
How do I get brand standards?
Work within your marketing team or contact us today to help you develop and create your brand standards. We’ll work with you to determine the best mix of color palettes, brand tone and set you up with brand creatives to get you started with your digital marketing.
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