Brand Style Guides and why you should have one

Too many companies are simply without brand guidelines documents. Even some of the bigger ones do not have clear documentation on when, where, how and why to use their brand mark in various media and settings.

Over the years I have created many logos and brandmarks. But when it comes time for a client to pay that extra little bit for the documentation that supports that mark, they often balk at such thought. But protecting your logo, and in turn your brand, is a KEY part of building a brand.
How you are perceived by your customers is something completely within your control. From social media to print to any collateral materials you produce. Consistency is the key here. And a brand guidelines document is the bible.

For those of you not familiar, a Brand Guidelines document details all of the aspects of how your company's mark and materials are presented. From detailed information about fonts, spacing and kerning, free space, color specifications, rules for putting the mark on backgrounds be they solid or photo and much more.

The document should detail the proper usage and also detail some of the ways NOT to display the logo. Of course, non-proportional scaling is one of the big ones.

Too often an over zealous marketing person, or someone on the sales staff will create a document to send to a client that does exactly that. They will dig around the server, or worse yet, copy the logo from the web site, slam it into their Word document and then scale it so it fits some kind of random space. Usually, at this point, the logo looks terrible because it has been squashed or stretched and in the case of some taken off the web, look pixelated or have backgrounds attached to them that look out of place.

Marketing professionals need to police these usages and make sure that a brand guidelines document is available to anyone that might need to create documents for their company. Of course much of this can be avoided by providing a complete set of templates for things like powerpoint presentations, proposals and other Word docs.

The main point is, don't skimp on this phase of your brand development process. Even more important than a good mark is using it properly. To ensure that, the rules for usage must be set.