Hey there, designers and business owners! Have you ever found yourself hanging in confusion between Brand Books and Brand Guidelines? Don’t worry you’re not alone! It’s a common puzzle that many peoples are trying to solve so I’ve decided to shed some light on Brand Book vs Brand Guidelines.
Brand Book Design
Brand Story
It can include the brand’s history, origins, and evolution. It may detail how the brand was founded, how they grow, the challenges they faced, and milestones they achieved.
Mission & Values
Describe the purpose and solution that your brand is offering to audience for make life easier. It will make positive impact that your brand is beyond just making profits. It includes the core values that guide the brand’s decisions and actions.
Mission and Values defines the brand’s commitment to certain ideals or causes. How it aligns with the needs of its targeted audience.
Brand Personality
Think of a brand like a person. What kind of personality does it have? Is it fun and playful, serious and professional, innovative and cutting-edge, or maybe traditional and reliable? This things will totally depend on what are brands doing, defining the right personality is very important. It plays the huge role in the strategy of your branding and marketing.
Brand personality will also help in shaping how the brand communicates and interacts with its audience.
Visual Elements
Visual Elements cover the visual aspects of the brand. This includes the logo (a symbol that represents the brand), color palette (specific colors that evoke the brand’s emotions), fonts or typography styles (evoke the brand’s personality) , and graphic elements.
Create rules on how these visual components should be used across different materials to maintain a cohesive and recognizable brand identity.
Communication Style
Defines the tone of voice and language the brand uses to communicate with its audience. For instance, is the brand’s communication casual, formal, friendly, or professional?
Outlines guidelines on messaging, storytelling, and how the brand wants to be perceived through its communication.
Examples
Provide real-life examples, case studies, or mock-ups demonstrating how all the elements discussed above come together in actual brand materials, such as advertisements, social media posts, packaging, or websites.
These examples serve as a reference to ensure consistency and alignment with the brand’s essence. If you are willing to run your brand for long time or life time you won’t stick with only 1 person or agency for all of your visual elements. Every visual designers has their own style. That’s why this rules and examples are super important to give a proper overview of your brand to designer.
Brand Guidelines Design
Logo Usage
Specifies rules on how to use the logo in different contexts, such as its size, placement, clear space around it, color variations, and what not to do with the logo. This will helps to create constant brand identity across all the platform without loosing quality of visual designs.
I have wrote an article previously on responsive logo. It’s falling under this usage guidelines you can read full blog to know in detail about responsive logo. Why it’s important and benefits of creating a responsive Logo?
Color Palette
Details of the primary and secondary colors of the brand, including their specific color codes (hex codes, RGB & CMYK values). It explains where and how these colors should be used together and in what proportions.
Typography
Provide guidelines on fonts to use for different purposes—headings, body text, captions, etc. It includes font styles, sizes, and any specific guidelines on formatting text.
Imagery Style
Describe the visual style or types of images that should be used in alignment with the brand. This could involve specific photography styles, illustration preferences, or image treatments (such as filters, effects or presets).
Application
Demonstrate how to apply the brand’s visual elements across various materials. It shows examples of how the logo, colors, fonts, and imagery should be used in contexts like digital platforms, print materials, merchandise, etc. Show some mockups to present how your original branding and marketing materials will look when it’ll be ready after printing or how it’ll look on different digital platforms.
Why brand book or guidelines is super important for your brand?
Understanding the importance of a Brand Book and Brand Guidelines is like creating the rulebook of your brand’s identity.
The Brand Book serves a comprehensive information to dive into the core essence of your brand. It holds the brand’s story, missions, values, personality to make bridge of emotional connection between brand and audience. It aims to establish connections between both.
Brand book includes vivid descriptions of the brand’s mission, vision, and the unique story that sets it apart. Moreover, it showcases the visual identity elements such as logos, color schemes, typography choices, and imagery styles, painting a vivid picture of how the brand should look and feel.
On the other hand, Brand Guidelines born from the insights of the Brand Book. Provide practical and specific instructions on executing this visual identity consistently. They outline the dos and don’ts regarding logo usage, color palettes, font selections, and image treatments across various platforms and materials. These guidelines act as guards to ensure that every elements are representing the brand to a standard visual language.
Both the Brand Book and Guidelines are useful tools in crafting a brand’s persona, building trust, recognition, and resonance with its audience. It’s totally depend on the brand’s size or their works but ignoring both can make bad impact on your brand.
How much can you spend for it?
The cost for creating a Brand Book and Brand Guidelines can vary dependent based on several factors. The complexity of the brand, the scope of work, the agency or designer hired, and the depth of detail required. Generally, the pricing can range from a few dollars to several hundred dollars or more.
For basic overview of pricing simple Brand Guidelines with basic logo usage, color palette, and typography guidelines might cost less. Brand Book and Guidelines in-depth could be more expensive it’s totally depend how much details you are looking for.
My advise is to discuss your specific requirements and expectations with designers or agencies. Get quotes and several packages that meet your needs and budget. Professionals usually offer pre-made packages that provide common requirements of small and large brands. You can check this packages if your requirements has covered under the package that’s great. Otherwise you can communicate with designer or agency to create custom offer for you.
How much we charge?
Well, we have different packages for brand guidelines and brand book both. Our packages are starting at 20 USD for brand guidelines and logo design. We are offing custom packages also so don’t hesitate to reach out us. Visit our website for further information about us.
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FAQ’s
A Brand Book holds brand’s story, mission, values, personality, and visual elements like color palette, typography, usages guidelines and more. When brand guidelines serves just visual elements and rules of using that elements.
In term of compression No! But brand guidelines serves all the things that include in brand book. You can say that brand guidelines is a part of brand book.
It include the brand’s history, origins, and evolution. It may detail how the brand was founded, how they grow, the challenges they faced, and milestones they achieved.
Brand Guidelines born from the insights of the Brand Book. It serves all the visual elements and rules of how to use this elements.
Thank you for the good writeup. It in fact was a amusement account it.
Look advanced to far added agreeable from you!
By the way, how could we communicate?
Your interest on our post is appreciated checkout Contact Us page, you can get the details there.