Brand guidelines: what to include (checklist)

What brand guidelines are for

Brand guidelines let people who aren't you produce work that looks and sounds like you. That means freelancers, printers, new hires and whichever agency runs next year's campaign. If one of them has to message you before making a poster, the guidelines have failed.

Most small and mid-sized businesses need 10 to 20 pages, not 80. A long document nobody opens protects the brand less than a short one everyone uses.

When we deliver a brand identity, the guidelines ship with the logo files, a design system and social templates, because a logo on its own doesn't tell anyone how to use it.

The checklist

Work through these in order. Each section should answer the questions a designer would otherwise ask you.

1. Brand foundations

One page, not a manifesto. Cover what you do, who it's for, what makes you different, and a few personality traits with a line on what each one means in practice. "Friendly" is useless; "we explain fees before anyone asks" is a rule someone can follow.

2. Logo

This is the section people use most, so make it the most specific:

• Versions: primary, horizontal or stacked, an icon for small spaces, and a single-colour version.
• Clear space: the minimum empty area around the logo, measured in a unit from the logo itself.
• Minimum size: in pixels for screens and millimetres for print.
• Backgrounds: which version goes on light, dark and photographic backgrounds.
• Misuse: show it stretched, recoloured, outlined or with a drop shadow, each marked as wrong.
• Files: SVG for the web, PDF for print, PNG for everything else.

3. Colour

List every colour in HEX for the web, RGB for screens, CMYK for print, and Pantone if you print a lot. Then say how much of each to use, because the same five colours in different proportions look like different brands.

Check contrast before you sign off. The WCAG 2.2 contrast rule asks for at least 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text. Our own yellow, #fcbd1c, scores just 1.69:1 on white and about 11.9:1 on this site's near-black background, which is why the site puts yellow on dark and never the other way round.

Write the allowed text and background pairs into the guidelines, so nobody discovers the problem on a printed banner.

4. Typography

Name the typefaces and weights for headings, body text and interface labels, with a size scale and line heights. Add system-font fallbacks for places where your fonts won't load, like email and Office documents.

Check the licence. Desktop, web and app licences are often sold separately, and a font licensed for your laptop may not be licensed for your website.

5. Voice and tone

Mailchimp's public style guide puts it well: you have the same voice all the time, but your tone changes. Describe the voice, then show how the tone shifts between a sales page, a support reply and an apology.

Include words you use, words you avoid, and a few before-and-after rewrites. They teach faster than adjectives.

Decide how you address customers in each language.

In Bahasa Malaysia, "anda" reads polite and neutral while "awak" feels casual. In Hindi, "aap" is respectful and "tum" is familiar. Pick one per language and write it down.

6. Imagery and icons

Describe the photo style: lighting, framing, and who appears in them. Show people and places that look like your customers in Malaysia or India, not stock offices from somewhere else. For icons, fix the stroke weight, corner style and grid size so new ones match.

7. Templates

Templates are where guidelines save real time. At minimum: social posts and stories, a presentation deck, a letterhead and invoice, an email signature, and your WhatsApp Business profile photo and catalogue images, since WhatsApp is often the first place customers in both markets see you.

Rules for more than one language

A brand in Malaysia might publish in English, Bahasa Malaysia, Chinese and Tamil. One in India might use English, Hindi and a regional language such as Kannada or Tamil. Each script needs its own decisions:

• Pick typefaces that cover every script, or pair them on purpose. Google's Noto family covers more than 150 writing systems, including Devanagari and Tamil, and makes a sensible fallback.
• Adjust size and line height per script. Devanagari and Tamil often need more line height than Latin text to read comfortably at the same size.
• Fix the spelling of your name in each script, and decide whether the wordmark is ever translated. Usually it isn't.
• Keep text out of images, so a translated campaign doesn't need a redesign.
• Test layouts with real translations. Translated copy often runs longer than English, and a button that fits in English can wrap in Malay.

Protect the brand before you print it

Search for existing trademarks before you finalise a name or logo, not after the signage is made. In Malaysia, trademarks are registered with MyIPO under the Trademarks Act 2019. In India, applications go to the Controller General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks, which accepts e-filing through IP India.

Trademarks are territorial, so a Malaysian registration doesn't protect you in India. Both countries belong to the Madrid System, which Malaysia joined in 2019, so one international application through WIPO can cover several countries at once.

Keep the guidelines alive

Guidelines go stale the day you launch a new product line. Give them one owner, put a version number and date on the cover, and review them once a year.

A PDF is fine for a small team. Once several people design for you, move to a shared library in your design tool, so the logo files and templates can't drift from the rules.

Send the guidelines with every brief, including your web team's: a site built from the brand's type scale and colour pairs, like the ones we build in our web development work, stays on-brand long after launch. If you're starting from scratch, a focused identity project usually takes 2 to 4 weeks. Tell us what you're building.