Brand Guidelines

Now when I take a look at the brief  I thought I covered everything however, Brand Guidelines I missed the first time round, I've never really had much experience with Brand Guidelines and we've never been taught anything about it so I decided to take it into my own hands and do some research.

Here you can see an example of a brand guideline I found when I simply googled 'Brand Guideline'. It appears to be a general guide for outsourced design companies to follow when designing for a specific brand to maintain their brand image, and also product consistency. I guess this makes perfect sense as you wouldn't want a company designing something for you that didn't portrait your companies/products truly or to your standard.

As you can see this small screenshot contains the CMYK & RGB numbers for each of this companies colours that they use for the Logo, that includes the Icon and the Title. very specific colours to maintain that brand consistency so people can recognise the brand.

Next to that you can see a list of fonts under very specific sub headings of where they must be used, 'ITC Avant Garde' in Bold and Regular must only be used for the Headline Fonts, for Body copy Fonts it is different variations of Helvetica.

It seems to me like that it is a general guide to fall back on when ever unsure on any decisions, as there are some options within the brand guideline however it keeps you on track, there is some flexibility.

Here is a snippet from the Homebase brand guideline, it shows the top brand logo, that should ONLY be used on white backgrounds, that is the green text, orange O.

Below that it shows the Homebase in white text, with an orange O and says that you can use this type of logo colour scheme against any background that 'Optimises the visibility of both the brand colours'.

So again, there is flexibility but only a very limited amount.


I definitely think I'm ready to give my own brand guideline a shot now I know what to include; However the one thing I am unsure on is that we are designing a bookcover for penguin, so is it for the Brand Penguin, or specifically for our book? We'll see.




Image Sources: http://www.rawww.com/img/brand-guidelines.jpg
http://www.anoop-parikh.com/images/library/homebase_brand_guidelines_01.jpg