Understanding Brand Guidelines: What is it and what does it encompass?

What exactly is Brand Guideline? Ensuring the cohesive and professional design of a business's communication materials is crucial for credibility. So, what does a Brand Guideline, including its significance and structure, consist of? In this article, Mytour introduces you to the standards of a brand as well as its meaning and structure.

Brand Guideline Demystified

Brand Guidelines encompass a system of symbols, images, and information related to a brand comprehensively. It aims to help customers easily 'identify' the brand. With Brand Guideline, brands will find it easier to build, develop, and solidify their image in the minds of consumers.

Brand Guidelines go beyond a mere logo or slogan, also incorporating elements like representative colors, font styles, and brand personality. All these factors contribute to creating a unique brand identity that can distinguish between various brands. Developing a comprehensive and complete Brand Guideline requires a significant amount of effort and time for research and construction, posing a constant challenge for marketers and brand managers.

The Significance of Brand Guideline

Brand Guideline plays a crucial role for businesses, specifically:

• Facilitates easy brand recall: To be remembered, a brand needs a distinct name and identity to make an impression. A cohesive and professional Brand Guidelines set enhances consumer trust and recognition.
• Saves brand time: With a clear brand guideline, brands save time on design and ideation for each promotional campaign. Applying these common standards ensures consistency in brand communication activities.
• Optimizes budget and streamlines communication campaigns: Quality and clear Brand Guidelines provide a solid foundation for developing communication campaigns. Brands can implement promotion and communication strategies, repetition, and synchronization to increase brand recognition and become a top priority in consumers' minds.

What Does Brand Guideline Include?

While no two brand guidelines are entirely alike, they generally include fundamental elements. Let's explore what a Brand Guideline comprises with Mytour.

Overview of the Business

This provides a general description of the brand for people to understand its values, culture, and work ethos through the mission statement. It's a crucial factor expressing the core values that every business strategy must adhere to in order to achieve specific goals.

Logo and Usage Guidelines

The logo is one of the most important elements forming the brand identity. To connect with customers, the logo not only needs to be visually appealing but also needs to encapsulate stories, meanings, and inspirational messages. In the Brand Guideline, businesses can flexibly adjust the color, style, and size of the logo to meet the requirements in different situations and specific cases.

Color Standards Palette

The color standards palette defines a set of colors that a business uses in its designs to meet specific marketing purposes and requirements. This standard will be applied to design the logo, website, events, promotional materials, ensuring everything adheres to a consistent color tone. Over time, this color standardization will form a unique characteristic of the brand, enhancing recognition with customers.

Typography

This is also one of the crucial elements of the brand handbook. Typography includes the fonts used to guide the design of blogs, websites, advertising content, and even for taglines in communication.

Visual Identity 

Visual Identity helps establish an accurate brand design system, meeting the desires of both the brand and customers. Shaping the image style in brand design allows employees to freely create within boundaries, generating enthusiasm in their work while achieving high efficiency in communication.

Tone & Voice

The tone and writing style in brand communication need to be consistent and aligned with the general regulations of Brand Guidelines. Corresponding to the unique characteristics of each brand and the target audience, language and communication methods must be chosen to fit the common standards and harmonize with the logo and images used.

Principles of Brand Guideline Design 

Brand Guideline plays a significant role in the effectiveness of a brand's operations. Therefore, brand managers need to ensure the construction of clear and consistent brand standards. The design of Brand Guidelines should not rely on intuition but adhere to the following principles:

• Logo Design Rules: Specify the size, standard colors of the logo, its variations, color schemes, spacing, position on promotional materials, and what to avoid when using the logo.
• Color Consistency: The brand needs a specific color palette to harmonize designs for blogs, websites, promotional materials, etc., to avoid visual confusion and enhance customer recognition.
• Choose Appropriate Fonts: Depending on the purpose and target audience, the brand should define primary and secondary fonts in the Brand Guidelines. Specifically, businesses need a common standard for font usage, such as font size, header format, character spacing, line spacing, paragraphs, etc.
• Unified Brand Imagery: Establish specific standards for designing images for promotional materials: Dominant color of images, use of photos or animations, pursued concepts, image effects used, etc.

Beautiful Brand Guideline Templates

The purpose of brand guidelines is to shape and maintain the stability of factors influencing the brand. Below are some beautiful Brand Guideline templates from large businesses for your reference:

Here are some powerful tablet templates to assist you in the design process. Let's check them out!

So, here, Mytour has shared information about what is included in the Brand Guideline. Hopefully, through this article, you will have a better understanding of what the Brand Guideline of Vietnam is, enabling you to build a professional brand identity.

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