Brand Guidelines
Brand guidelines are a rulebook for your company's look and feel, ensuring everything from your logo to your tone of voice is consistent and recognisable.
What should be included in a company's brand guidelines?
Think of brand guidelines as the instruction manual for your brand. It's a comprehensive document that ensures everyone, from your internal team to external partners, represents your company in a unified way. A solid set of guidelines, sometimes called a brand bible, is the foundation of a strong brand identity and is a key output of a well-thought-out brand strategy.
A good set of brand guidelines typically includes your company's mission and values, logo usage rules (think spacing, minimum size, and what not to do), a defined colour palette with specific colour codes, typography guidelines covering fonts, sizes, and hierarchy, and a clear tone of voice. It also often covers imagery style, dictating the type of photography or illustration that fits your brand, and may include examples of how to apply the brand across different materials like websites, social media, and print.
Why are brand guidelines so important for business consistency?
Consistency is the cornerstone of trust. When your audience sees the same colours, logos, and messaging across all your touchpoints, they begin to recognise and trust you. Brand guidelines are the tool that makes this consistency possible. They eliminate guesswork and ensure that every piece of communication, whether it's a social media post or a new website page, feels like it comes from the same source.
This consistency does more than just build trust. It strengthens brand recognition, making you more memorable in a crowded market. Internally, it creates efficiency. Your team can create new materials faster and more confidently because they have a clear set of rules to follow. Ultimately, this leads to a more cohesive and professional user experience, showing your audience that you are organised, reliable, and care about the details.
What is the difference between brand guidelines and a style guide?
It's a common point of confusion, but the distinction is quite simple. Brand guidelines are the comprehensive, overarching rulebook for your entire brand. They cover everything from high-level strategy and tone of voice to the visual elements. They are the single source of truth for your entire brand identity.
A style guide, on the other hand, is usually a more focused document, often a subset of the main brand guidelines. For example, you might have a specific web style guide that details how brand elements should be applied online. It would cover things like button styles, form field appearances, and heading sizes for your website. While the brand guidelines say 'use this font', the web style guide says 'use this font at this specific size for a H2 heading on the blog'. The style guide is the practical application of the brand guidelines for a specific context.
How do you create brand guidelines in Figma for a Webflow project?
Creating brand guidelines in Figma is a brilliant way to build a living document that directly informs your Webflow development. It bridges the gap between design and build, ensuring what you design is exactly what gets built. The process starts by establishing all your core brand elements as styles and components within Figma. This means defining your colour palette as 'Colour Styles', your fonts as 'Text Styles', and reusable elements like buttons and icons as 'Components'.
This approach essentially turns your Figma file into an interactive style guide. When it's time to build in Webflow, there's no ambiguity. A developer can inspect the Figma file and see the exact values for colours, spacing, and typography, making the Figma to Webflow handoff incredibly smooth. For more complex projects, this can even evolve into a full design system, ensuring perfect consistency as your website scales. We've written a whole guide on how to achieve a flawless handoff from Figma to Webflow if you'd like to dive deeper.
Ready to create brand guidelines that build trust and consistency?
While it's possible to create your own brand guidelines, partnering with an agency can bring a level of strategic insight and objectivity that's hard to achieve from within. It's not just about documenting what you already do; it's about defining a brand that will help you achieve your future business goals. An experienced partner can help you see the bigger picture, challenge your assumptions, and build a brand framework that is both beautiful and functional.
At Tahi Studio, we help businesses build solid digital foundations, and that always starts with a clear and consistent brand. We work with you to understand your vision and translate it into practical, powerful brand guidelines that empower your team and resonate with your audience. If you're looking to refresh your brand identity or build one from the ground up, we're here to be your guide. Feel free to get in touch to chat about how we can help build a brand you can be proud of.
