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If you’re looking to find out how to create a brand guide, we’ve got you covered. In this article you’ll find a list of the 10 best brand guide examples to inspire your brand guide style.
The signature red of Coca Cola, the clap back from Wendy’s whenever they’re mentioned on Twitter, the getting-your-name-wrong-on-the-order of Starbucks. All of it is brand. But a “brand” doesn’t just appear out of nowhere. First it is created in a strategy, and then it is made coherent in brand guides and templates, to ensure that the brand’s presence is consistent across all channels.
In this article we’ve taken a look at 10 brand guides from some of the most successful brands in the world, to see how they approach their brand guides.
A brand guide is a document that defines a brand’s visual and verbal identity in an effort to make sure that the brand is represented in a consistent tone across all channels. In addition to defining rules for the use of logo colors and fonts, brand guides usually also cover things like tone of voice and …
Most brand guides include the following section:
Other elements that are commonly found in most brand guides:
While brand guides usually contain the same elements, they come in many different shapes and sizes. So to help you find inspiration, we’ve gathered a list of the best brand guide examples on the internet.
Today Netflix might be one of the most recognizable brands, so the Netflix brand guide has a big responsibility when it comes to making sure that their brand isn’t diluted or misused.
Whether we’re talking design assets for social media teams, tone of voice for copywriters or guidelines for external translators the guide literally has to cover everything.
This is obvious even from just taking a look at the logos section of the Netflix brand guide. While it of course covers ordinary topics like the necessary spacing around the logo, how to use it alongside a partner logo, and what contrast ratios to use for what backgrounds, it also goes a step further. For instance, in the do’s and dont’s part of the logo section it prohibits the use of both their logo and their wordmark on anything that goes on the ground (doormats) and on food.
While most brand guides are created with the purpose of instructing internal marketing and brand teams as well as agencies, that is not the only use case for a brand style guide, and the brand guide Spotify for developers is an excellent example.
While a brand like Netflix or Coca Cola can focus on how their employees, their partners, and freelancers should represent their brand, Spotify—as a publishing platform—needs to take their publishers into account as well.
Which is why the Spotify brand guide includes how bands and podcasts can use their logos and artwork, how other applications are allowed to integrate Spotify content, and how to handle referencing Spotify metadata to other platforms.
Spotify for developers becomes a one-stop-shop for everyone business or freelancers interacting with Spotify as a business.
While most brand guidelines are made for a business or an organization, that isn’t always the case, and the independent marketing agency Copacino-Fujikado managed to show this off beautifully in their Pride Brand Guide.
It is important to note that this brand guide example is not a brand guide or one of the many Pride organizations, but instead a brand guide created by Copacino+Fujikado’s LGBTQ+ employees.
Additionally, this brand guide isn’t an internal guide for Copacino+Fujikado. It is instead a guide for all brands that want to support the LGBTQ+ community and want to avoid just rainbow washing their brand.
It gives brands an introduction on how to manage Pride celebrations, introduces the history of Pride as a riot, it stresses the importance of knowing why your brand wants to show support, and it includes a design guide on the rainbow colors and flag variations. But most importantly it stresses the importance of being an ally all year around.
We can’t really talk about how to nail your branding without touching on SURREAL the cereal brand, and while we may not have access to SURREAL’s internal brand guidelines (if they even have any), we do have access to a description by the agency that made the SURREAL brand what it is.
With a tongue-in-cheek approach and slogans like “The world is serious enough – there’s no reason breakfast has to be” the brand managed to carve out a niche for itself.
While Steam is an online platform and a digital product first, the Steam brand guide has to cover more than just digital formats and logo use in other platforms. Because of the wide range of product offers that relate to steam, their brand guideline covers everything from logo use to compatibility icons in digital format as well as on printed products and packaging.
While essentially not a brand guide, we would be remiss not to mention the Valve Employee Handbook when we talk about Steam and their parent company Valve. While it doesn’t contain information on logo use or tone of voice, it does an excellent job of showing off their brand values internally, as it takes its place as what is most likely the only employee handbook we’ve ever really wanted to read.
While Slack is another digital product that many other brands interact with through platforms and integrations, they’ve taken a different approach than brands like Spotify and Steam.
The Slack brand guide is simple in design, and covers everything it needs to, but nothing more.
After describing the brand assets and how to use them, the brand guide spends less than a page going over naming, merchandise use etc. Simply stating “If true, you're welcome to say that your product integrates with Slack (we love that!)”
The NASA brand is probably one of the most recognized across the planet, being featured in countless movies as well as toys and costumes, so you would imagine that the NASA brand guide has had its work cut out for it.
And it has.
But it is also another study in simplicity, as it mostly focuses on how to use the different logos and how not to use them. One great example of adding something extra to an otherwise simple brand guide, is the accompanying image when the guide states that “The NASA Logotype (Worm) should be used in large and bold applications”.
The hire-a-designer platform Dribbble’s brand guide is little more than a landing page, and doesn’t use any time on unnecessary fluff. The first sentence is used to explain the dual metaphor nested in their brand name and the second sentence is used to remind readers that Dribbble is spelled with a capital D.
And apart from that quick intro, and the prompt to download the Dribbble logo package, the page’s main content contains a list of three do’s and three don’ts along with the backseat girl gif and Shaun the Sheep giving a thumbs up, proving that less is more.
While the Foursquare brand guide is quite ordinary in terms of how it is structured, covering things like colors, logo design, wordmark, fonts, sizing, and shapes.
An interesting addition, which really makes this brand guide worth mentioning, is that Foursquare has included a section on Map pins, and while this is of course directly tied into their product as a geolocation platform, it could be an interesting addition to many brand guides.
In some aspects the IKEA brand guide (IKEA Clear & Simple) has the same content as most other brand guides. There’s a section on IKEA trademarks, their logo, the typeface, color and so on.
But what it also contains is sections on photography, price communication, and co-branding.
The brand guide is filled with examples of images and copy, as well as explanations on why choices were made. Just take a look at their approach to illustrations and animations, which includes the following pointers:
At first glance, an addition like “No cartoons” may seem like purely a design choice. But within their explanation they highlight that: “Cartoons are exaggerated and satirical illustrations. They often ridicule or stereotype, and are goofy just for the sake of it.”
Another interesting inclusion is their approach to price communication which states that “We must always have price communication in all the content produced.” This approach is double interesting as it can be seen as part of even the more loose parts of their social media and branding efforts.
For big brands there’s a tendency to create brand guide platforms instead of a document. The Netflix brand guide is an excellent example, here anyone collaborating with the brand can request access and because it is a digital resource rather than a static document their brand guide can be easily updated and rolled out to their users.
If you’re reading this, however, there’s a pretty good chance that you need an easy way to create a brand guide for a small organization rather than a global entity.
So, while we will leave the choice of static document vs brand guide webpage up to you, we’ll help you find out how to create a brand guide in 10 easy steps.
While it seems obvious, the introduction in brand guides is often deemed unnecessary. But there’s a reason you should add an introduction, as it gives you an opportunity to explain the thought process behind your brand, which will help content creators and designers expand on the ideas within the brand guide without going off brand.
You might think that you are in total control of how your logo will be used, but without a defined set of rules, there’s a good chance that the appearance of your logo will drift little by little.
To avoid this you need to define:
You’ll need to reference the color palette for everything from social media assets to web design and video production, and because different design platforms have different color formats you’ll most likely need to define colors in both RGB, CMYK and as hex codes.
While it may seem easy to just pick a font and stick to it, there’s often a little more to it than that.
It’s a good idea to define sizes and boldness for everything from body copy to headlines, subheaders, and title sections.
And secondly, even if you pick a readily accessible font, there’s a chance you won't have access to it automatically across every single tool or platform you use. For instance, even though it’s a common font, your CRM may not offer Arial by default, so if you chose Arial as your font you need to either specify alternatives or you need to provide information on how to download and install your chosen font across various solution types.
In the section on visuals and graphics you want to cover everything from photography and illustrations, to video and the use of icons.
A good visuals section should act like a point of inspiration for your designers rather than a list of assets that have been approved for use (that list should be in your DAM system).
It’s a good idea to include examples of what you want to see in terms of photographs, illustrations, icon design etc. but it’s equally important (if not more so) to include examples of what not to do when it comes to visual assets.
Defining your tone of voice is an important part of your brand guideline. When you first start out, you may only have a single person who needs to follow it, but as your content efforts grow there’s a good chance you need to share it with freelancers, external agencies, and new hires.
While most tone of voice sections list three identifiers or your brand’s tone of voice, like “fun”, “casual”, and “playful” along with descriptions of why these are important markers, many tone of voice guides leave out examples.
They are quick to say things like, “our brand voice is professional, because we cater to a professional audience” but terms like “professional” or “playful” will mean different things in different contexts.
So, a good tip for writing the tone of voice guide is to include examples. For instance, you could write “we want a personal and relatable tone of voice in our blog posts, but we also want our content to be taken seriously. This means we write from a first person perspective, and include anecdotal examples when it makes sense, but we always back up statements with references to trusted sources.”
While the included brand templates are often just branded letter-paper, an email signature design and a link to the slide deck template, you can do a lot more with the brand templates section. There are plenty of systems that let you use assets from your DAM to create dynamic templates to help automate content creation.
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