A brand's logo, colors, type and voice on one page, for the team and every outside vendor.
Brand guidelines tend to live in a PDF that the people who need it can't find. The sign painter gets a logo pasted into an email and matches the color by eye. This page shows the same rules as a link: a made-up repair shop's logo, colors, type and voice. A page can't attach your logo files, so the sample ends by naming the files that travel with the link.
Who it's for
Designers handing a finished identity to a client, and small businesses that want one answer to "which blue is it?". The readers are the client's own staff plus every outsider who works with the brand: printers, sign makers, web developers, the freelancer writing next month's posts.
A single page suits a brand with one logo and a few rules. A company with sub-brands and packaging specifications needs a longer document, and a print shop will still want a printed swatch, because no screen shows a color the way paper does.
What a good one contains
- Logo versions in order of preference. Three in the sample, with an instruction to pick the first that fits.
- Clear space and a smallest size, drawn. The margin is half the button's height, and the full logo stops at 120 px wide. It's shown at that size.
- Misuse, pictured. Six small tiles: stretched, recolored, tilted, shadowed, on a pattern, retyped. People skim a list of rules and remember a squashed logo.
- Colors with codes that copy. Hex and RGB for each, a line on what it's for, and a bar showing how much to use. Red thread gets 3%.
- Type anyone can get. Two typefaces already on the reader's computer, four sizes and three rules.
- Voice, as pairs. Each rule has a line to write and a line to avoid: "New zipper by Thursday. $32." against "Fast turnaround at competitive prices!"
- The rules in use. A claim ticket, a window sign, a woven label and a post, each captioned with the rules it follows.
Short enough to follow
Every rule you add is one more for a vendor to miss, so write down only the decisions people get wrong. The sample has no mission statement and no brand story. It has the six logo mistakes its designer expects, each one drawn.
Name a person to ask. The sample's last section says who checks a proof before anything is printed. A rule will change one day. Replace the page under the same address, so the link a printer bookmarked last spring opens the current rules. A version number and a date in the top line, as in the sample, tell them it changed.
How to send it
As an open link. It gets handed to sign painters, printers and freelancers you'll never meet, and none of it is secret. Anything that slows them down sends them back to guessing.
Every page you publish gets one link that opens in any browser. You choose who can open it: anyone with the link, anyone with the password, or only the people and company domains you name, who sign in with Google or Microsoft. Change the page later and the link stays the same.
