Week 1
Check the decisions
What is actually agreed. Guidelines record decisions; they cannot make them, and finding an unsettled one late is the usual cause of delay.
Creative direction · Brand guidelines · Sydney
Brand guidelines
The average brand guidelines document is ninety pages, was opened twice, and is currently being ignored by everyone making assets. Length is not the problem. Being unusable is.
Grab the snowball. Give it a spin, and watch it grow as you scroll. Just like consistency.
6steps from decision to adoption
1named owner who can say no
Examplesright and wrong, for every rule
Shortbecause long ones go unread
The short answer
What should brand guidelines actually contain?
Brand guidelines are the written rules for using a brand: the marks, type, colour, layout, imagery and voice, with the decisions explained and the edge cases answered. They exist so somebody who was not involved can make something correct without asking.
The failure mode is universal and worth naming. A long document, produced at the end of a rebrand, describing the ideal case beautifully and saying nothing about the awkward ones. It gets opened when someone needs the logo file, and never again.
So we write short guidelines aimed at the person making a thing at five o'clock, with the exceptions answered and an owner named. It sits inside our wider creative direction service, and because our Snowball SEO platform automates the search heavy lifting other agencies bill by the hour, more of your budget goes into the work.
The difference
Why do most guidelines go unread?
Because they were written for the brand rather than for the reader. The person opening them has a deadline and one question, and the document is organised around neither.
What makes guidelines usable
- Organised by task, not by brand element
- An answer for the cases that do not fit the rule
- Right and wrong examples side by side
- A named person to ask, with a stated turnaround
What makes them ignored
- Ninety pages when the reader has four minutes
- Rules with no reason, which get broken as soon as they are inconvenient
- Nothing about the edge cases, which are most real briefs
- A file nobody can find when they need it
Guidelines document decisions; they do not make them. If the decisions are not settled, that is visual direction first.
The cost
What drives the price of brand guidelines?
How much has already been decided, and how many audiences the document serves. Writing down settled decisions is quick. Discovering they are not settled is the expensive part.
Essentials
Short document
The rules people need most often, organised by task, in a document short enough to be read in one sitting.
Full guidelines
Complete
Every element covered, with exceptions answered, for brands where many people and suppliers make assets.
Guidelines and rollout
Applied
The document plus the session that makes people use it, which is the difference between a file and a habit.
We quote after a free consult. Where the underlying decisions are not settled, we will say so, because guidelines cannot fix that. See visual direction.
What moves the number, in order
- Whether the underlying decisions are settled or have to be made first
- How many elements are in scope
- How many edge cases have to be worked through and answered
- Whether external suppliers are an audience for it
- Whether it is a document, a web page or both
- Whether rollout and training are included
Write for the person with a deadline
Everyone who opens brand guidelines is in a hurry and looking for one thing. Organising the document by brand element serves the author; organising it by task serves the reader.
So the contents page should read like the questions people actually have. How do I make a slide. What do I do with a photo that is the wrong shape. Which logo on a dark background. Who do I ask.
A twelve-page document organised that way is used. A ninety-page one organised by element is not, however thorough it is.
The scope
What you receive
Short, organised by task, and findable when somebody actually needs it.
The guidelines
Written for the person making something, organised by the questions they arrive with rather than by brand element.
Right and wrong examples
Side by side for every rule, because a rule stated without a counter-example is interpreted differently by everyone.
The exceptions
What to do when something does not fit, which is most real briefs and the section that is almost always missing.
Asset access
Where the files live and how to get them, because most guideline lookups are somebody hunting for a logo.
A supplier version
A short brief an external designer or agency can be handed, so their work arrives close rather than needing correction.
A named owner
Who decides the cases the document does not cover, with a stated turnaround, because unanswered questions become improvisation.
The return
How does a document become a habit?
Not by being issued. Adoption is a separate piece of work from writing, and it is the one almost nobody budgets for.
Put it where the work happens
Guidelines in a folder on a shared drive are consulted by the people who already know them. Guidelines linked from the place where assets are made are consulted by everybody.
That usually means a web page rather than a document, next to the file library, linked from the templates. It is a small logistical decision that changes adoption more than anything in the content.
The other half is the owner. Every guideline document generates questions it does not answer, and if nobody is named, the answer becomes whatever the person decided on their own, which is where drift starts.
The process
How guidelines get made
Three to five weeks, assuming the decisions underneath are already settled.
Week 1
Collect the questions
What people currently ask, from the person who fields those questions today. This becomes the contents page.
Week 2
Draft, organised by task
Written for somebody with a deadline and one question, not as a tour of the brand.
Week 3
Work the edge cases
The awkward briefs answered explicitly, which is the section that decides whether the document is trusted.
Week 4
Place and link
Published where the work happens, linked from templates and the asset library rather than filed.
Week 5
Roll out
A working session applying it to real recent work, and a named owner with a stated turnaround for what it does not cover.
The brief
What to ask before you commission guidelines
Guidelines are the most commonly produced and least commonly used brand deliverable, so ask about use rather than content.
How will this be organised?
By task, or by brand element? The second serves the author and is why most guidelines go unread by the people they were written for.
Does it answer the awkward cases?
Ask to see that section. Most guidelines describe the ideal case only, and the ideal case is not what anybody needs help with.
Where will it live?
Linked from where assets are made, not filed on a drive. This one logistical decision affects adoption more than the writing does.
Who answers what it does not cover?
A named person with a stated turnaround. Without that, every unanswered question becomes an improvised decision, which is exactly what guidelines exist to prevent.
We are happy to answer all four. If the decisions underneath are not settled, we will say so: that is visual direction work, not documentation.
Start here
Ready to write something people use?
Tell us what people currently ask the person who owns the brand. The free consult is a working session, not a sales call, and you leave with three things whether or not you book us.
- The contents page your guidelines should have, drawn from the questions people actually ask
- An honest read on whether your decisions are settled enough to document
- A fixed price, with rollout costed separately
Good questions
Brand guidelines FAQs
What should brand guidelines include?
The rules for marks, type, colour, layout, imagery and voice, with the reasoning explained and the edge cases answered. The two most valuable sections are what to do when something does not fit and who to ask, and both are almost always missing.
How long should brand guidelines be?
Short enough to be read. Most useful guidelines are a dozen or so pages organised by task. Ninety-page documents are read once, by the person who commissioned them, and consulted thereafter only to find a logo file.
How much do brand guidelines cost?
We quote after a consult. What moves it is whether the underlying decisions are already settled, how many elements are in scope, how many edge cases need answering, whether external suppliers are an audience, and whether rollout is included.
Why do guidelines get ignored?
Because they are organised around the brand rather than around the reader's task, they describe only the ideal case, and they live somewhere people do not go. All three are fixable and none of them is about the writing quality.
Should guidelines be a document or a web page?
A web page, in most cases, linked from where assets are actually made. A document is easier to produce and harder to keep current, and version confusion in brand guidelines is a genuine and common problem.
Do we need guidelines if we are a small team?
A short one, yes, and mostly for the external suppliers. The moment anybody outside your building makes an asset, the rules have to exist in writing or they do not exist at all.
What if our brand decisions are not settled?
Then guidelines cannot help yet, and we will say so. Documenting an unsettled decision produces a rule nobody follows because nobody agreed to it. That is direction work first.
How often should guidelines be updated?
Whenever the answer to a question changes, which is more often than annually and less often than most people fear. The named owner keeping a running list of questions asked is what makes updating manageable.