How to Create a Company Brand Guide

Tips for Building Your Company's Brand Guide

With so many brands emerging online each year, it’s crucial for every brand to differentiate itself from the competition. Setting your company apart means clarifying your unique brand identity to create unique connections with your audience. To do this, you’ll need to create a company brand guide. 

Hiring season is right around the corner, so it’s a great time to get a brand guide in place. New employees and contractors need to know your brand guidelines. If you haven’t yet created a brand guide for your company, let’s talk about what it takes to get started. 

What is a Brand Guide? 

A brand guide is a set of guidelines that informs the brand design and voice of all communications that come from your company. These materials include approved elements for marketing content (copy, images, videos, colors, fonts, sounds), print materials, and all digital media. Brand guidelines help your internal team members, plus any contractors you may work with, to know what design elements are allowed in any content your brand produces. 

Brand guides include side-by-side do’s and don'ts for a brand, too. Companies often include a set of images that’s a good aesthetic fit for their brand, contrasted against images that are a poor fit. They’ll also share rules for the presentation of design elements like logos, alongside rules for ways the logo should not be displayed. 

Aside from the visual aspects of your brand, your brand guide will tell your team how the tone and voice of your communications should look, sound, and feel. For instance, these guides typically include examples of what a piece of written content should look like coming from you. This helps your team know how to best communicate with your audience.

Why Should I Create A Brand Guide? 

A brand guide creates a design standard for your company to use. This in turn creates consistency across all your brand touchpoints, both online and offline. Consistency ultimately builds brand recognition and helps to effectively communicate your brand values, too. 

When a customer or newcomer comes into contact with your brand, you want their experiences to be of the same quality and tone no matter how they find you. Everything from your website messaging to your social media posts to your customer service DMs should be a true reflection of your brand. You can’t accomplish this without an effective brand guide. 

Now that you understand the importance of having a great brand guide, what is included in brand guidelines? Read on, and let’s talk about it. 

What Should I Include in My Brand Guide? 

So what should you include in your brand guidelines? There are a number of important elements to consider when putting together a guide to your brand’s communications, digital and print media, and online marketing. Let’s take a look at some of the most critical pieces of what to include in a style guide. 

How to Create a Brand Book

To create your brand guide, gather information and make decisions about the following:

• Your brand story and the “why” behind your brand. This is a crucial, foundational piece of your brand guide since it informs everything you do as a company. 
• Visual style guidelines. Your brand guide should solidify your style guidelines. This information includes your brand colors (including hex codes so designers know exactly what colors to use), typography (header and body text fonts, line height, white space, etc.), logo usage do’s and don’ts, and your overall design aesthetic. 
• Your brand voice. A brand guide should define your brand’s voice for messaging. Just like your visuals should be consistent, your written communication should be, too. For instance, what does your brand tone sound like? Lighthearted, polished professional, compassionate, or humorous?

Shop Corporate Gifts and Merch That Fit Your Branding 

Now that you know how to create a brand book, it’s time to shop for corporate gifts and merch that fit your established branding. Having the rules for your logo design, colors, fonts, and more on hand will make shopping so much easier. 

Corporate branding adds to your brand recognition, and fantastic merch skyrockets it! When your brand looks great on high-quality products, people will sit up and take notice. Order items for your team to wear or use, include logo-branded merch as giveaways, and take that brand recognition one step further. 

Here are three powerful ways to create corporate gifts and merch items that align with your brand guide. 

Merchology Product Design Studio

The Merchology Product Design Studio allows you to create fully custom merch items called Special Make-Up items. That means these unique products are created especially for your team, and only your team! Each unique item created in the Merchology Product Design Studio can’t be found anywhere else.

Custom MerchBoxes 

Looking for a great customized gift for your team? Consider designing your own MerchBox that’s aligned with your new brand guide. You can scale your order to fit any budget and make your MerchBox as big or small as you need. Plus, have it shipped right to your recipient’s door for an unforgettable special delivery!

Shop Over 300 Brands

Want to find the best co-branded merch that fits your company’s guidelines? At Merchology, we feature over 300 brands - plenty to choose from! We make it easy for you to find the perfect logo-branded merch that aligns with your brand guide.

Contact Us 

Now that you know how to create a company brand guide, it’s time to shop for merch! If you need help finding the right branded merch and corporate gifts for your brand, we’re here to help. Contact us today for assistance, or to get your order started!