Most brand guidelines fail in the same way. They're beautiful, they're ninety pages long, and six months after delivery nobody has opened them since the day they arrived.
The test of a guidelines document isn't how it looks. It's whether someone who has never met you can make something on-brand using only that file.
Here's what earns its place.
The logo, properly specified
More than a picture of the logo.
- Every version you have, and when to use each: primary, stacked, horizontal, icon only, one-colour.
- Clear space. How much room around it, expressed as a proportion of the logo itself so it scales.
- Minimum size, separately for print and screen. Plenty of logos that work on a poster become mush at 24px.
- What not to do. Don't stretch, don't recolour, don't add effects, don't put it on a busy photo. Show the wrong versions — people understand rules faster from the bad examples.
- On backgrounds. Which version goes on white, on black, on your brand colour, on a photograph.
Colour, in every format you'll need
The most common gap. A palette shown as swatches with no values is useless the moment someone needs to type one in.
Give HEX, RGB, CMYK and Pantone for each colour. State which is primary, which is accent, which are neutrals.
Then the part most documents skip: which pairs are allowed. Not every combination in your palette is readable. Say which text colours work on which backgrounds, and include the contrast ratios. It saves an accessibility problem later and stops someone putting your light grey on your off-white.
Typography, with a real scale
Name the typefaces, say where each is used, and give the licence details and where to buy them.
Then give an actual scale: H1 through to caption, with sizes, weights, line heights and letter spacing. "Use Roboto" tells someone nothing about how to set a page.
Include the fallbacks for when the brand font isn't available — in an email, in a Google Doc, on a system that can't embed fonts.
The bits that are usually missing
These are what separate guidelines that get used from guidelines that get admired.
Tone of voice, with examples. Not adjectives. Three words like "clear, warm, direct" mean nothing on their own. Show a sentence written badly and the same sentence written properly. Include words you use and words you avoid.
Photography direction. What your images look like: subject, treatment, colour, whether people look at camera. A mood board of six images beats a paragraph.
How things combine. Most misuse happens not in single elements but in the arrangement. Show three or four real layouts: a social post, a slide, a page header, an email.
Digital specifics. Your logo at favicon size. Your colours checked for contrast. How the brand behaves in dark mode, if it needs to. Most guidelines are written for print and then get used almost entirely on screen.
Files, in the same place. A guidelines PDF with no accompanying asset folder sends everyone back to you for the logo. Include the actual files, named clearly.
What's usually filler
A long brand story. One page of positioning is useful context. Eight pages of narrative about your values is read once by the person who commissioned it.
Mood boards with no rules attached. Inspiring, unusable.
Every possible application. You don't need a page about how the brand looks on a hot air balloon.
Rigid rules for things that will change. Lock the logo and the colours. Leave room in the layout system, or people will break the rules rather than fail to do their job.
Format matters more than you'd think
A PDF is fine and is what most people expect. But consider:
A web page is easier to keep current, easier to search, and can link directly to downloadable files. A guidelines site that lives at a URL gets used far more than a PDF that lives in someone's downloads folder.
A Figma file works well if your team designs. Components and styles can be used directly rather than recreated.
A one-page summary alongside the full document. Logo, colours, fonts, three rules. That's what 90% of people need 90% of the time, and giving it to them separately means they don't have to go looking.
How long should it be?
For a small business, 15 to 25 pages is plenty. For a company with multiple teams and sub-brands, 40 to 60.
If it's over 80 pages, somebody was being paid by the page.
Questions we get asked
Who actually needs a copy?
Anyone who makes something with your name on it: your team, your printer, your web developer, any agency you work with, and often a new starter on their first day. That's the audience to write for — not a design award panel.
How often should guidelines be updated?
Review annually, update when something real changes. The most common trigger is a new website, because it usually introduces components and rules the original document never anticipated.
Our guidelines exist but nobody follows them. What now?
Usually it's a findability problem rather than a compliance one. Put the one-page summary and the asset files somewhere people already are — a pinned message, a shared drive folder, a link in the onboarding doc — rather than a PDF attached to an email from two years ago.
If you have guidelines that nobody uses, or none at all, send us what exists and we'll tell you what's missing.