Brand Guidelines Design
The document that stops your brand drifting.
- 2–5 weeks depending on scope
Brand guidelines exist for one purpose: so people who were not in the room can apply your brand correctly.
Most guideline documents fail because they are written for designers. The people who most need them are a printer in a hurry, a new marketing hire, and an agency you have never met. So we write them to be used — specific values, clear rules, worked examples, and explicit "do not do this" pages.
Length is not the measure. A precise twenty-page document that gets followed beats an eighty-page manual nobody opens.
Work we have delivered
Pieces we produced for real clients. Never stock, never a template.
What's included
- Logo usage rules with clear space and minimum sizes
- Incorrect usage examples
- Colour values for print, screen and Pantone
- Typography hierarchy with real examples
- Photography and illustration direction
- Layout principles and grid guidance
- Application examples across media
- Tone of voice guidance where required
- Digital and print versions of the document
How we work
- 01 Discovery Business, audience, competitors and what the brand must signal.
- 02 Direction Moodboards and written creative direction agreed before designing.
- 03 Concepts Two to three distinct directions, presented in context.
- 04 Build the system Variations, typography, colour and applications.
- 05 Handover Guidelines document and every source file in vector format.
What you receive
- Brand guidelines PDF
- Print version
- Asset library with all logo files
- Colour and font reference sheet
Questions people ask
How long should guidelines be?
Long enough to be unambiguous and short enough to be read. Twenty to forty pages covers most businesses properly.
Who actually uses this document?
Your printers, your web developers, any agency you hire, and every new person who joins your marketing. It saves you repeating yourself.
Can guidelines be updated later?
Yes — we supply the editable source so it can grow as you add applications.
How a mark is made
Nobody draws a logo freehand.
It is built on a grid, so the spacing between the A and the N is the same relationship as the spacing between the T and the E. That is the difference between a mark that looks right at any size and one that only looks right at the size it was drawn.
Then it gets tested — weights, widths, spacing, and what survives when you take the colour away.
Redesigns
The mark on the left is what walked in the door.
A rebrand is not a fresh start. The job is to keep whatever recognition the old mark earned and throw away the rest.
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USHA Paints
The old mark had two competing weights and no shape of its own. The redesign keeps the equity in the name and gives it a container that survives being stencilled on a tin.
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Creative Concepts
A typed superscript replaced with a drawn monogram — the same two letters, but now something that can be embroidered, embossed and read at 12mm.
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SHEEN to Twani
A full rename, in two moves. The leaf that was decoration in the middle version becomes the stem of the t in the final one.
One brand, sixteen answers
You see one logo. There were fifteen others.
Presenting a single option is a way of hiding the work. Every route below was drawn properly, set on four different grounds, and shown side by side — because the only way to know a mark is right is to see what it beat.
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Four families, sixteen routes -
Each one tested on four grounds -
The chosen mark, specified in Pantone
The wall
Marks we have drawn or rebuilt.
27 of them
