What to include in brand guidelines

The short answer

A brand guideline document exists to answer one question on behalf of somebody who is not in the room: is this allowed? Everything below earns its place by answering that question for one kind of decision. If a section does not stop an argument or prevent a mistake, it is decoration.

1. 01Logo. every approved version, clear space, minimum size, and what nobody may do to it
2. 02Colour. primary, secondary and neutrals, with the values each medium actually needs
3. 03Typography. the families, the scale, the weights, and a fallback for when they are unavailable
4. 04Layout and spacing. the grid and the spacing unit everything else is measured in
5. 05Imagery. what photography and illustration should look like, shown rather than described
6. 06Voice and tone. how the brand writes, with before-and-after examples
7. 07Applications. the brand assembled on real things — card, deck, site, packaging
8. 08Governance. version, date, who approves exceptions, and where to ask

Eight sections, in that order. The order is not arbitrary — it runs from the marks that are least negotiable to the judgement calls that need the most context, which is also the order a new designer will read them in.

1. Logo

The most-used page in any guideline, and the one most often too thin. Four things belong here, and the last is the one people skip.

• Every approved version. Primary lockup, secondary or stacked arrangement, the symbol alone, and the one-colour version. Say which is the default, because somebody will otherwise pick whichever sits first on the page.
• Clear space. Expressed as a ratio of something in the mark itself — the height of the symbol, the width of a letter — never in millimetres. A fixed measurement is wrong the moment the logo is resized, which is always.
• Minimum size. Separately for print and screen, because the smallest legible size differs between them by a factor of two or more.
• Misuse. The actual violations, drawn. Stretched, recoloured, rotated, outlined, drop-shadowed, placed on a busy photograph, redrawn in the wrong typeface. Showing the wrong version is the only reliable way to prevent it; a sentence saying “do not distort the logo” prevents nothing.

2. Colour

Split the palette into primary (the one or two colours somebody would name if asked to describe the brand), secondary (support and accent) and neutrals (the greys that do most of the actual work in any interface or document).

For each colour, give every value the people using it will need:

• HEX for screens and for anyone working in a design tool.
• RGB for the same, where a tool asks for components.
• CMYK for print — and never converted automatically from the screen value, because the automatic conversion of a saturated brand colour is usually muddy. Have a printer confirm it.
• Pantone where the brand is printed on anything that is not paper, or where exactness matters more than cost.

Then say how the palette is used, which is the part most documents omit. Proportion is what makes a palette recognisable: a brand that is 80% white, 15% grey and 5% orange looks nothing like one using the same three colours in equal measure. Give a rough split, and name which colours may sit on which.

Include the contrast pairings that pass accessibility checks. If a designer has to work out which of your greys is legible on which of your backgrounds, some of them will get it wrong, and the brand will ship text nobody can read.

3. Typography

Name a display face for headings and a body face for everything else. They are frequently the same family at different weights, which is fine — say so explicitly rather than leaving it to be inferred.

• The scale. The sizes actually in use, with line height for each. A list of sizes without line heights is half a specification.
• The weights. Which ones are licensed and permitted. If the licence covers three weights, saying so prevents somebody buying a fourth.
• The fallback. What to use when the brand face is unavailable — in an email client, a shared spreadsheet, a client’s machine without the licence. Every brand hits this, and a guideline that ignores it gets Arial by default.
• Licensing. Where the font came from, what the licence covers (desktop, web, app), and who holds it. This is the single most expensive thing to get wrong later.

Show a specimen — the alphabet, numerals, and a real paragraph — rather than only naming the family. The paragraph is what tells a reader how the face behaves at the size they will actually set it.

4. Layout and spacing

The section that separates a document people can apply from one they can only admire. Two things carry it.

A grid. Columns, gutters and margins for the formats the brand actually uses. Not an abstract grid — the ones that get used are the ones drawn at the sizes somebody will open tomorrow.

A spacing unit. One number, usually 4 or 8, that every gap in the system is a multiple of. This is the single cheapest rule in any guideline and the one that does the most to make unrelated work by different people look like it came from the same place.

5. Imagery

Art direction is almost impossible to specify in prose and almost trivial to specify in pictures. Show a grid of photographs that are right and a grid that are wrong, and write one line under each explaining the difference — lighting, crop, colour treatment, whether people look at the camera, whether images are staged.

If the brand uses illustration or iconography, the same applies, plus the mechanical rules: stroke weight, corner radius, whether icons are filled or outlined, and the grid they are drawn on.

6. Voice and tone

Frequently the weakest section, because it gets written as three adjectives — “confident, friendly, human” — that no two people would apply the same way. Adjectives are not a specification.

What works instead:

• Before and after. The same sentence written wrong and written right. One pair teaches more than a page of description.
• We say / we never say. A list of actual words and phrases.
• The mechanics. Sentence case or title case, the Oxford comma, how numbers and dates are written, whether contractions are used. Small, dull, and the difference between a brand that reads as one voice and one that reads as nine people.

7. Applications

The brand assembled on real things: a business card, a slide, a social post, a page of the website, packaging, signage, an email signature. Whatever that particular brand will actually appear on.

This section does a job none of the others can. Everything above defines parts in isolation; this shows them working together, and it is where somebody looks when they have to make something new and want to know what “right” feels like. It is also the most persuasive part of the document for the client paying for it, because it is the first time they see their brand as a thing rather than as a set of rules.

8. Governance

Four lines, usually on the last page, and routinely forgotten:

• Version and date. Guidelines get emailed around and live for years. An undated document has no way to lose an argument with an older copy.
• Who approves exceptions. There will be exceptions. Naming the person turns a rule from a wall into a door.
• Where to ask. An address that a person actually reads.
• What is mandatory versus advisory. Not every rule carries the same weight, and a document that presents the logo clear space and a suggested photographic mood with equal force will have both ignored equally.

How long should it be

Long enough to answer the questions that will actually be asked, and no longer. In practice that tends to land in three bands:

• 10–20 pages for a small brand with one or two people applying it. Logo, colour, type, a spacing rule, a few applications.
• 30–60 pages for most studio work — every section above, properly shown.
• 100+ pages for an organisation with many teams, sub-brands, regional variants or regulatory constraints.

Page count is a symptom, not a target. The real test is whether a designer who has never met you can open it, find the answer to a specific question in under a minute, and act on it without asking.

Five common mistakes

• Rules without examples. “Use the logo respectfully” is not a rule. Draw the violation.
• Screen values only. A palette with no CMYK is a palette that will be guessed at by a printer.
• No fallback font. Guarantees the brand renders as Arial somewhere, probably in something a customer sees.
• A PDF with no source. The document ages the moment it is exported, and the next person cannot update it. Hand over the editable file alongside it.
• Beautiful and unusable. A guideline is a reference document somebody consults under time pressure, not a portfolio piece. If it is hard to navigate, it will not be consulted — and a guideline nobody opens has failed no matter how it looks.

Putting one together

Most of the work in a guideline document is not deciding what the rules are — the designer already knows those by the time they are writing it down. It is the assembly: laying out forty pages, placing swatches, setting specimens, and doing it again from scratch for the next client.

Framebook is built for that part. You author the document once as a Figma template, mark which parts are the brand, and it fills with any client’s colours, type and logos — handing back an editable Figma file rather than a flat export. The template guide covers how to author one, and the first three pages of any template generate free.