brand guidelines.
Guidelines that fall apart in production are not guidelines. Colours, typography, rules for using your logo, visual grammar: the reference document that keeps every one of your materials consistent, from letterhead to façade.
Most brand guidelines are designed for the screen, then break down in production: a gradient that cannot be cut in vinyl, a colour that shifts on a matt surface, a typeface that becomes illegible when embroidered at thirty millimetres. Because we also make the materials, we test our choices against the reality of the workshop before fixing them.
The deliverable is a document any supplier can work from: a palette with screen, print and vinyl references, typefaces with their licences, logo placement rules and clear space, and examples of correct and incorrect use.
Already have an identity but nothing written down? We can also formalise what exists rather than redraw everything. It is often better value for money.
from audit to document.
questions we are asked.
What exactly goes into a set of brand guidelines, and what does not?
Brand guidelines set the rules for using your identity: the logo versions and their clear space, the colours with their references for screen, print and vinyl, the typefaces and the heading hierarchy, the rules for images and layout. They do not contain your finished items. A business card, a sign or the side of a van is drawn afterwards, by applying those rules.
We already have a logo and colours, but nothing written down. Does everything have to be redrawn?
No, and that is the usual case. We formalise what exists: we record the colours actually in use, we recover or rebuild the logo files, we settle on a typeface that will last, and we write the rules down. Your customers still recognise you. We only redraw what causes a real problem, a colour that cannot be held in print, for example.
What really changes if we do not have them?
Every item gets remade from memory. The red on the sign is not the red on the van, the logo in the brochure is not the one on the polo shirt, and nobody knows which version is right. You pay for set-up time again on every order, and the result reads as several companies rather than one. Brand guidelines settle these questions once.
Who can use them afterwards? Do we have to come back to you?
They belong to you and can be passed to whoever you choose: your printer, your web agency, a new colleague. That is the whole point, since they make your identity usable without us. On our side, the source files are kept from one order to the next, so coming back to the studio saves you supplying everything again. Nothing obliges you to, though.
What do we receive at the end?
A written set of rules, and a folder of files: the logo in vector and in image form, in its various versions, for light backgrounds as well as dark ones, the colours with their references for each reproduction method, and the names of the chosen typefaces. The vector file is the key piece, since it scales up to a façade and can be used to cut vinyl without any loss of quality.