Developing a brand book is an essential task that requires collaboration between brand managers, designers, and marketers, depending on the company's structure. It can also be outsourced to a specialized team such as Ambasco. The following is a guide to creating an effective brand book in ten steps.
Start researching your competitors to differentiate yourself. Understand their target audience, brand style, and unique features. This is the basis for developing a brand identity that stands out from your main competitors.
Clearly define your brand's identity, including mission, values, slogan, tone of voice, character, positioning, target group (customer persona), and unique sales proposition. This step captures the “essence” of the brand before moving on to the visual elements.
This phase involves designers who work based on the brand identity. This includes determining in detail all aspects of the brand's visual elements, such as the logo, colors, fonts, and other elements.
Explain how to write the brand name, including format, size, and whether quotation marks are required, and whether it can be used in other languages.
Define color schemes in various color models, including RGB, HEX, CMYK, and Pantone, for various applications, both in digital and print media.
Choose or create the main font and any secondary fonts, specifying variations in style, size, font weight, alignment, and other parameters.
Outline rules for formatting documents and brand presentations to ensure consistency in visual style and content.
Provide variations of web elements such as buttons, banners, and email signatures. It is useful to provide visual representations of what these design elements should look like on computer screens and smartphones.
Includes examples of how to represent the brand on offline materials such as business cards, banners, buildings, vehicles, and more.
Detail guidelines for using graphics, photos, and patterns. This description must be visual, clear, comprehensive and easy to understand.
A brand book can be formatted as a PDF document, a presentation, or hosted online on the brand's website; there are no strict criteria for the format, but we recommend a digital brand book (link to the digital brandbook page on the site) because it's easy to customize and accessible to everyone. A brand is constantly changing and the handbook is therefore constantly being updated.
By following these steps carefully, you'll develop a thorough and effective brand book that consistently reflects your brand's identity and values across all channels. This document will guide all future brand-related decisions and designs.
Check out our own brand book to get inspired.
Of course, we are happy to help you with your branding. Let us hear from you!
