No Brand Guidelines? Here’s How to Start (And Why You Should)

What happens next varies from business to business. Some can readily produce a formal packet, complete with vector logo files, brand voice, color hex codes and a typographical hierarchy from title to paragraph. Others have some rough notes and a pixelated JPG of the logo. A few have nothing but the logo.

Why do we ask about brand guidelines, though? For practical reasons, of course, to make sure we match the look and feel the brand expects. But the answer can also be revealing.

Brand guidelines are ultimately a way to document decisions about what the brand is. If those decisions aren’t codified, it usually means nobody has actually made them, at least not officially. If nobody has decided what the brand is, it tends to drift as each person puts their own spin on it, and a business that looks a little different every time it shows up is harder for customers to recognize and easier for them to doubt.

“Harder to recognize and easier to doubt” is something no business wants to hear about themselves. Fixing it doesn’t always take a big branding project, though. For most businesses, a single page that answers the most important questions about the brand can be enough.

Let’s get into why brand guidelines matter, what goes on that one page and how to build it from what you already have.

How Businesses End Up Without Brand Guidelines

Nobody really chooses to skip brand guidelines. A lot of businesses start scrappy, and in the early days, decisions about branding and marketing take a backseat to spinning up services or getting a product out the door. Some gaps have to be filled, so they get taken care of as they arise, as quickly as possible. The owner gets a logo from their friend as a stopgap. They hire a web developer on Fiverr. New employees come onboard and make flyers, social posts and brochures with the tools they have on hand and their own best judgement.

By the time the business gets to a point where they can spare the bandwidth to really think about branding, it can feel like there’s no reason to. The company has a logo, it has a website and it has a sales deck. It’s worked up until now, right?

But if you look at the whole picture, you start to see the inconsistencies. There are three versions of the logo in circulation, two shades of blue and this brochure uses Arial while that one uses Garamond. The business sounds completely different depending on who’s writing for it that day.

The inconsistency isn’t really anyone’s fault, and fixing it doesn’t necessarily mean starting over from scratch, but it is worth fixing.

The Costs of Inconsistency

Imagine you’re on a road trip. You need to stop for lunch, and you spot a McDonald’s at the next exit. But wait a second… those arches aren’t golden. They’re blue.

What do you do?

You pull into the normal-looking Taco Bell next door.

Would you trust the blue arches? You’re going to at least hesitate, and you’ll probably wonder whether it’s a real McDonald’s at all.

Recognition and Credibility

Jenni Romaniuk, who studies brand recognition at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, explains that identifying a brand by its colors, logo and other assets is a mostly subconscious, automatic and almost instant process. People expect those visual cues, and when the cues are wrong, that creates a feeling that something is off. I’d describe that feeling as “friction,” and it can be fatal to engagement.

Psychologists have also found that information that feels familiar tends to feel more credible, so a business that looks unfamiliar, even to its own customers, gives up some of that credibility.

The blue McDonald’s is an extreme example, but the same hesitation you might experience in that situation happens every time a prospect sees something they don’t expect from you, even something as small as a font. This happens even if they can’t name what’s different (and they often can’t).

Of course, McDonald’s golden arches didn’t inspire confidence the day they were first put on a sign. They do now because the company has used them the same way for decades. Romaniuk notes, in a maybe unintentionally grim but no less accurate turn of phrase, that “the natural state of memory is to decay.” That means brands have to keeping using their distinctive elements to keep the recognition they’ve built, and she names inconsistency as one of the most common ways they fail to do it.

Most businesses without brand guidelines aren’t worried about maintaining recognition, of course. They’re still building it in the first place. Inconsistency is even worse in that situation, since the brand has so little recognition to spare and every deviation chips away at it. A brand like McDonald’s can probably afford to play with their branding a bit, say for a special event or promotion, thanks to decades of rock-solid consistency behind it.

Safety

Inconsistency can also make your brand feel unsafe, in a world where people are increasingly wary of scams.

Anyone who has sat through phishing training has been drilled to look for messages that don’t look quite right, and a lot of big, recognizable brands try to teach their customers the same habit. PayPal, for example, tells people to look for its logo to tell its real emails from fakes.

Your customers are learning to judge whether a message is legitimate by how it looks. A message from your business that doesn’t look like the last one can set off alarm bells. Brand guidelines that keep everything consistent help you avoid that.

Your customers are also learning to associate a level of polish with safety. Cybersecurity training usually lists typos among the common signs of a scam, as well as visual indicators like pixelated logos or stretched photos. Sloppiness sends a signal of danger, even when the business behind it is completely legitimate. Good guidelines help here, too, by setting a standard for quality alongside consistency.

Time and Effort

One of the less obvious downsides to not having strong brand guidelines is simply wasted bandwidth.

When someone needs the logo, can they just grab an approved, high-quality version from your guidelines kit? Or do they have to go hunting for it across your website, their inbox, your social media or anywhere else they think of? And, are they going to have to think about which logo is the real one?

Is everyone on the same page about what’s correct, or do you spend time in meetings figuring out which blue is the right one?

Do you have to explain your branding to every new freelancer you work with? Do you end up sending work back because it doesn’t match what you already have?

Each of these examples is a small but measurable waste of time, and it adds up. Worse, if the root of the problem isn’t addressed, it never stops adding up.

Creating Your Brand Guidelines in One Page

That’s a lot of words about why you should care about fixing a lack of guidelines. Let’s get into how you do it.

Big brands will typically have an entire booklet dedicated to laying out their guidelines in exacting detail, and we’ve made some of those ourselves. If you have zero guidelines today, that might be something to work toward depending on the complexity of your brand ecosystem, but it takes time, expertise and probably a lot of meetings.

Something quicker and simpler can fix a lot of basic branding issues in the meantime.

If I had to get a whole company on the same page about branding as fast as possible, here’s how I would do it. I’d answer these four questions on one page:

Which Logo Do We Use?

Point the reader to a shared folder with the following files:

• A vector file (EPS, SVG or PDF) for print and signage
• A PNG with a transparent background for documents and web use
• Versions of the logo for light and dark backgrounds
• A square version for social profiles

Then include notes on:

• How much empty space to leave around the logo
• Mistakes to avoid, like stretching, recoloring or adding effects to the logo

What Are Our Colors?

List your brand colors and note which one is primary and which are accents. For each color, list the following color codes:

• Hex, for websites
• RGB, for other digital purposes
• CMYK, for print
• Pantone number, if you use spot colors

What Fonts Do We Use?

Less is more when it comes to typography. One or two fonts is all you need. List these:

• The name of each font and what it’s for, like headlines or body text
• Where to get it
• A backup font that everyone has, if the brand fonts aren’t available

How Do We Sound?

This is a lot more abstract than the other questions, and it’s easy to write something vague or generic. “Friendly but professional” by itself doesn’t really tell anyone how to write in the brand’s voice. Show as much as possible, rather than just telling. Include:

• A high-level description of your brand voice
• Words and phrases to use
• Words and phrases to avoid
• A few before-and-after examples, like:
  • Instead of “We leverage innovative solutions to meet your needs,” we’d say “We help you figure out what isn’t working and fix it.”

Start With What You Already Have

Depending on your role, you may have read that list and found yourself thinking, “I have no idea how to answer those questions.”

That’s completely normal. The good news is that you probably have a better starting point than you think. If you have inconsistent logos, colors and type out in the wild, that means you actually have more materials than you need and you just have to decide what’s official and what gets dropped.

Logo

If you have several versions of the logo, deciding on one can come down to a few factors. If one is noticeably more professional than the others, that’s a strong candidate. If they all look roughly equally legitimate, keep the one customers have seen most, even if it isn’t your personal favorite. What’s recognizable to your buyers is more important than what you like.

Once you’ve settled on what the real logo is, collect the files. If they’re not all already somewhere in your system, ask the original designer, if you can still reach them. If not, check with your print and signage company, since they often have vector files from previous jobs.

In the worst case scenario where nobody has the vector files, you may need a graphic designer to recreate the logo. Resist any urge to redesign while you’re at it. This process is about quick cleanup, while a whole new logo is a bigger branding project that needs time and care.

Colors

Colors are a bit easier to sort out. If the brand colors appear in the logo, choosing a correct logo also decides the colors. The logo’s vector file will have the exact color codes built in and a designer can grab them quickly.

If the logo doesn’t contain some or all of the brand colors, you’ll need to choose from what you have out there already. If you’ve been using two shades of blue, pick the one that customers have seen more.

It’s worth noting that colors don’t convert perfectly between screen and print. When you settle on your colors, you’ll need a designer or printer to translate your hex and RGB codes to CMYK and Pantone, and vice versa.

Fonts

Fonts can be pretty easy to settle. If the fonts you want to make official are in a Word document or an email, you can see what they are right in the dropdown. If you’ve only used them on your website or in designed assets, you may have to ask your web manager or a graphic designer.

Logo lettering is often custom or modified, so don’t worry about matching your fonts to that exactly. You will want them to work together, though. If your logo is very formal, don’t decide that Comic Sans is your official headline font (actually, just don’t use Comic Sans under any circumstances).

Before you make a font official, check that your whole team can use it. Some fonts require a paid license, and a font installed on one person’s computer isn’t automatically available to everyone else.

Voice

Look at your written material and decide which ones sound the most distinctly like your brand and which ones don’t. Compare the two and note what makes the former stand out.

If you have data on how your marketing materials have performed in the past, that can also inform your decision. An email campaign or brochure that went over well can show you what language resonates most with your audience.

Templates: Make the Correct Version the Easy One

Bonus round: once you have your brand guidelines, a great next step is making them as easy as possible to follow. Nobody wants to go off-brand on purpose, but when you’re on a deadline and you don’t know where to get the right logo or you’re not sure what the right color is, corners start looking cuttable.

That’s where a good set of templates come in. Templates remove the choice between “fast” and “correct,” and turn them into the same thing.

Build a handful of on-brand templates for the things your team uses most often, like:

• Slide decks
• Print documents
• Brochures
• Emails
• Social media graphics

Then put them somewhere easy to find, like a shared drive folder or a brand kit in software like Canva.

Guiding Your Brand

The four questions above are simple in theory, but in practice, answering them can be a little overwhelming. If you’d like some help putting together your one page or think your brand might need a deeper cleanup, let’s talk. As you might guess from our name, we live for this stuff.