id8 creates brand guidelines to document how to use your logo, fonts, colors, spacing, and style for future brand sustainability.
You might assume you develop your brand guidelines after the brand identity, but at id8, we don’t. We wait to create brand guidelines until after the full corporate identity, marketing materials, and website are designed. In the past when we tried to write guidelines first, we would end up rewriting them over and over.
As we translate the brand identity into marketing materials and digital we are still exploring and innovating. We question how we will place and design graphics to best support the brand. It’s not a linear process.
Visual Patterns In Brand Guidelines
We look at the full package of marketing materials. Our creative team searches for similarities and differences to find patterns. These patterns start to form rules and then those rules start to create guard rails as you would see on a bridge. We deliver our guidelines in the format of a multi-page PDF. This document gives you creative freedom within limits. It helps you to maintain consistency – to stay on the bridge without veering into the river below.
Selected Fonts
The brand guidelines define appropriate fonts and font styles that you can use with the logo. This includes fonts for print and digital, including fonts to use in an email. There are three to five fonts selected in the font family due to varied needs or font limitations within the office, including those people who need to have access to use the logo daily, but who do not have access to a Mac or the complete font library the marketing team uses.
How to Use the Logo
The guidelines also create rules for the placement and usage of your logo on various materials. This includes a safe zone around the logo so other graphics or words don’t impede and take away from the legibility of the logo. We also identify the spot colors, CMYK conversions, and RGB conversions so that your logo has the correct color when seen digitally or in print. This limits variation and maintains consistency. If your brand color is red, it should be the same red whether viewed on a website, seen on a billboard, or in a video.
Brand Guidelines For Sustainability
Finally, we list rules around corporate identity. These include specifics like how to list the phone number. Details of whether there are dots or hyphens between the area code, prefix, and line number. Should you include a small logo in the email signature? How should you align the signature within the content of the email? We make it clear.