Brand Guidelines: What to Include, Examples and Template

In short: brand guidelines are the document that sets how your logo, colors, fonts and images are used, so every piece of material stays consistent no matter who produces it. For a small business, 10 to 20 pages are enough, and building them on an existing logo takes roughly 24 to 40 hours of a designer’s time, which is the number to multiply by the rate you are quoted.

A visual identity rarely falls apart in one go. It wears down in small steps: a slightly different blue on a flyer, a stretched logo on a trade show banner, a third font added for a one-off promotion. Two years later, the brand no longer looks like itself from one channel to the next. Brand guidelines exist to stop that drift.

What are brand guidelines?

They are the user manual of your visual identity. A logo is a drawing; the guidelines answer the practical questions around it. Which version goes on a dark background? What is the smallest size allowed on a promotional pen? Which color code do you give the printer? Which font goes in a headline and which in body copy?

You will also hear them called a brand style guide, a brand book or brand standards. The words overlap. When people separate them, the brand book tends to cover the story, mission and tone of voice, while the style guide covers the visual rules. A small business can keep both in one file.

The document is written for everyone who produces material: employees, the printer, the web developer, the marketing agency, the freelancer who runs your social accounts. It comes out of a broader job on positioning and values, which we cover in our guide to what branding is. Guidelines turn that positioning into visual rules. They do not replace it.

What should brand guidelines include?

Good guidelines are short, but every page settles a question. These are the sections you cannot skip.

The logo and how to use it

• Variations: primary logo, horizontal or stacked version, one-color versions (black, white) and a reduced version for small formats such as an app icon or a website favicon.
• Clear space: the empty area to keep around the logo, usually expressed as a proportion of an element of the logo itself.
• Minimum size: in inches or millimeters for print, in pixels for screens.
• Forbidden uses: stretching, recoloring, adding a drop shadow, placing the logo on a busy photo. One page of crossed-out examples works better than a long paragraph.

Colors

A palette usually holds one or two primary colors, two or three secondary colors and a few neutrals. Each color is given in every system someone will need:

Use	Color system	Example notation
Four-color process printing	CMYK	C100 M80 Y0 K10
Printing an exact spot color	Pantone	swatch book reference
Screens, office software	RGB	0, 0, 145
Website, social media	Hex	#000091

Add proportions too. An accent color that covers half a page is no longer an accent.

Typography

Two families are enough: one for headlines, one for text. The guidelines spell out the hierarchy (size and weight of headline, subhead, body copy) and name a fallback font available on every computer, for documents sent to people outside the company.

Check the license. A font bought for print does not always allow use on a website or in an app. Fonts released under an open license, such as those on Google Fonts, avoid the problem.

Graphic elements and imagery

Icons, recurring shapes, photo style (bright or moody, staged or documentary), how team portraits are shot. This is often the part that makes a brand recognizable before anyone reads its name.

Applied examples

Business card, email signature, quote or invoice header, social media post, sales deck. One page per item, with measurements. Our guide to marketing materials lists the ones small businesses actually use, so you only design for those.

How do you create brand guidelines, step by step?

1. Audit what already exists. Collect everything produced over the last two years and lay it out side by side. The inconsistencies jump out and give you the list of rules to write.
2. Start from positioning. Who are you talking to, and what should they remember about you? A law firm and a food truck do not call for the same choices.
3. Stabilize the logo. If it is unreadable at small sizes or cannot be printed in one color, fix it now, before you lock down everything else.
4. Pick and test the palette. Test every color on screen and on paper, and check text contrast (see below).
5. Set the fonts and hierarchy. Apply them to a real quote or a real blog post, not to placeholder text.
6. Write the document and share it. A PDF sent to every vendor, with the source files (vector logo, fonts, templates) stored in one shared folder.
7. Review it once a year. Guidelines that never change end up being ignored.

Contrast: the rule most guidelines forget

A color can be beautiful and unreadable. The W3C accessibility guidelines (WCAG, success criterion 1.4.3) require a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 between regular text and its background, and 3 to 1 for large text. Logos are exempt.

In practice, light gray on white and white on yellow or pale green almost always fail. State in your guidelines, for each color, whether it can carry text and in which color. That small detail prevents unreadable web pages on a phone in bright sunlight, and LinkedIn banners whose tagline nobody can read.

Brand guidelines examples

The U.S. Web Design System. The design system used by federal websites is a good model of rigor. Its color system grades every color from 0 (white) to 100 (black), and the difference between two grades tells you the contrast: a difference of 50 or more meets WCAG AA, 70 or more meets AAA. It also ships open-source typefaces, including Public Sans, which the team designed and maintains. You do not need that level of engineering, but the idea of making contrast impossible to get wrong is worth copying.

NASA’s 1975 Graphics Standards Manual. The manual written for the “worm” logotype is still passed around design studios because it shows how much a few strict pages can do: one logotype, clear rules on color and spacing, and applications from letterhead to the side of a rocket.

A small service business. For a five-person consulting firm, realistic guidelines fit in 12 pages: the logo and three variations, two primary colors and three neutrals, two fonts, plus templates for a quote, a slide deck and a LinkedIn post. Nothing more is needed.

A local shop. For a bakery, the focus moves to the sign, labels, bags and the window. The guidelines set minimum sizes that can be read from across the street, and logo versions that work for vinyl, a rubber stamp or engraving.

How much do brand guidelines cost?

No public price list exists, and quotes vary widely. The most reliable approach is to estimate the hours involved and multiply by the rate you are offered.

Job	Typical scope	Hours to budget
Guidelines built on an existing logo	10 to 20 pages, templates for 3 to 5 items	24 to 40 hours
New logo and full guidelines	Several creative routes, revisions, full file set	48 to 80 hours
Rebrand with strategy, guidelines and roll-out	Positioning work, many applications	Usually an agency project

For a reference point, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median wage of graphic designers at $30.27 an hour (May 2025). That is a salaried wage. A freelancer pays self-employment tax, software, equipment and unbilled time, so freelance rates sit well above it, and agencies add project management on top. At an illustrative freelance rate of $75 an hour, 24 to 40 hours comes to $1,800 to $3,000. Plug the rate you are quoted into our day rate calculator to compare offers on a common basis.

If the name and logo are new, add trademark protection. Since January 18, 2025, the USPTO charges a base application fee of $350 per class of goods or services, with surcharges of $100 per class for an incomplete application and $200 per class for a free-form description instead of one picked from the ID Manual. In the UK, the equivalent filing goes to the Intellectual Property Office.

Which tools and template should you use?

Tools. Online design apps offer “brand kits” that store your logo, colors and fonts and apply them to templates, which keeps non-designers on track. Interface design software is used to build website components. Vector drawing software remains essential to produce the logo and its print files.

Template. This outline is enough to get started:

1. The brand on one page (mission, tone of voice, audiences)
2. Logo: versions, clear space, minimum sizes, forbidden uses
3. Colors: CMYK, Pantone, RGB and hex codes, proportions, allowed text pairings
4. Typography: families, hierarchy, fallback font
5. Icons and photo style
6. Applications: stationery, sales documents, social media, website
7. Contacts and location of the source files

Hire a designer or do it yourself?

Doing it yourself works when the logo is solid and the goal is mostly to put things in order. Hiring a professional makes sense when the logo is the problem, when the brand is changing audience, or when several vendors work on it at the same time.

To compare two proposals, ask for the number of hours planned, the number of creative routes and revision rounds included, the exact list of files delivered (vector logo, fonts, templates) and a written transfer of copyright on the logo. In the United States, a logo made by an independent contractor generally belongs to its designer unless a signed agreement assigns the rights to you, so get that assignment in writing before you print anything.