Most brand guidelines PDFs are cargo cults. Forty pages of moodboards, adjectives, and stock photography of people laughing at salads, produced because real brands have guidelines and having one feels like being a real brand. Then the actual decisions, the ones employees and vendors make every week, go unanswered, and the brand drifts anyway.
A guidelines document has exactly one job: to let someone who is not you reproduce the brand without asking. Judge every page against that. If a page does not prevent a future inconsistency, it is scrapbooking.
The five rules yours must contain
- The files. Where the master logo files live, which format to use where, and what the files are named. Half of all brand drift is someone screenshotting a logo off the website because they could not find the real one.
- The colors, as codes. HEX for screens, CMYK for print, Pantone if you ever do merchandise. "Our blue" is not a specification. Three vendors given "our blue" will produce three blues, and all of them will be defensible.
- Clear space and minimum size. How close other elements may crowd the mark, and the smallest size at which each version may be used. This is the rule that keeps your logo from being shoved into a corner at 40 percent opacity behind text.
- The don'ts, with pictures. Do not stretch, do not recolor, do not add drop shadows, do not put the dark version on a dark photo. People follow forbidden-example pictures far better than prose.
- Typography, limited to two. The heading face, the body face, where each is used. Every additional permitted font is a future document that matches nothing.
Why short beats thorough
Here is the uncomfortable trade: a guidelines document is only as good as the likelihood someone opens it. A six-page PDF gets opened. A sixty-page brand bible gets admired once and then bypassed forever, because finding the logo rule takes longer than guessing. Big companies can afford brand police. You cannot, so your document has to be faster than guessing.
Consistency is not produced by the beauty of the rules. It is produced by the speed of looking them up.
The test
Send the PDF to someone outside the company and ask them to make a correct social banner with it. Time them. Every question they have to ask you is a missing rule. Every minute past ten is a page you should cut.