Brand book

A brand book (also written brandbook) is the reference document that gathers a brand’s whole identity in one place: its story, values, positioning, tone of voice and visual identity. It acts as a brand bible for everyone who speaks or designs on the company’s behalf, inside the team and at outside agencies.

Brand book or brand guidelines?

The two terms are used loosely, and in the United States they are often treated as synonyms. The distinction most agencies make:

• Brand guidelines are the rules: how to use the logo, which colors and fonts, what is allowed and what is not. They answer “how does the brand present itself?”.
• A brand book includes those rules, then adds the reasoning behind them. It also answers “why does the brand exist, who does it talk to and how does it speak?”.

In other words, guidelines are a chapter of the brand book. A company that only needs visual rules can stop at guidelines. One that also wants its teams aligned on message and personality goes up to a brand book. Agree on the content first and do not worry too much about the name.

Who uses it and when

• New hires grasp in one reading how the company presents itself.
• Agencies, freelancers and printers produce work without back-and-forth on every detail.
• Marketing and sales teams keep a consistent message across channels.
• Partners and press get a shorter public version with logos and usage rules.

The right moment is a rebrand, a growing team, several providers working at the same time, or a new product launch. A young company at the very beginning does not need a bulky book. A lighter version is plenty, and it can grow with the business.

Writing the hard chapters

Logos and colors are easy to document. The chapters on purpose and personality are where most brand books turn vague. A few habits help:

• Write the purpose as one sentence a stranger could repeat. If it needs a paragraph, it is not ready.
• Define the voice with pairs. “Friendly but not casual”, “direct but not blunt”. Each pair sets a boundary on both sides.
• Add real sentences. Show one line written the right way and one written the wrong way, taken from actual emails or web pages.
• Name the words to avoid, along with the term to use instead.

PDF or living web page

PDFs remain common but age badly: one version circulates by email, another sleeps on a drive, and nobody knows which one is current. More companies now publish their brand book as a shared web page: a single version to update, logos downloadable in one click, color codes you can copy directly. The right format depends on who reads it. A team of ten has different needs from a network of resellers.

How to read an example

Many brands publish their brand book online, which makes for a good source of inspiration. Look less at the style and more at the method: the space given to correct and incorrect usage examples, the precision of the logo rules, the sentences actually written to illustrate the tone. A brand book made of beautiful photos and grand principles helps no one produce compliant work.

Keeping it alive

A brand book is a working document. Name an owner, date the versions and tell every reader whom to contact when in doubt. When a brand project is delivered, it is the best moment to run a short walkthrough session: the document gets used far more once the team has seen how to use it.

A first, lighter brand book

A starter version fits on a handful of screens: the mission in one sentence, three personality traits with their tone of voice, the logo and its forbidden uses, the palette and typefaces, then a few golden rules to remember. A simple shared document is enough to present it, and it grows as the company discovers what causes confusion: a new channel, a new product, a first marketing hire.

Mistakes to avoid

• A document that is too long. Past a certain size, nobody reads it through.
• A beautiful book that is never used. Without concrete examples it stays decorative.
• Writing it without the teams who will use it. Sales and content people have specific questions.
• Never updating it. A new product or channel has to find its way into the document.
• Delivering the document without the matching source files.

To see how a brand book fits with the rest of the identity, read our entries on visual identity and brand positioning. Mazette.co’s Brand and graphic design offer covers brand creation, from strategy to identity and its usage rules.