Who actually opens it
Brand books tend to be written as if the board will read them. The people who open them are different: a contractor's designer who must lay out a brochure tomorrow, a marketer building a deck, a print operator whose logo came out in the wrong colour. None of them reads front to back. Each looks for one answer and closes the file.
So there is a single test for any brand book: can someone make a new piece with it without calling its author? What helps that stays. What does not is surplus, however good it looks.
What has to be there
The logo and its rules. The primary version, a compact version, versions for dark and light backgrounds. Clear space around the mark and a minimum size below which it must not be printed. This is where things break most often: the logo gets crowded by text or shrunk past legibility.
Colour, with codes. Not "a warm orange", but values for screen and for print. The printer works in one system and the web developer in another; if the document gives only one, the other gets matched by eye. It also helps to state proportions: which colour is the base, which is the accent. Otherwise the accent spreads across the whole page.
Typography. Which typefaces, which weights, used where: headline, body, caption. Add a fallback for the places where the main font is unavailable, such as an email or a Word file. If the font is paid, say where to get it.
Worked examples. The most useful section and the most neglected. Rules in a vacuum are easy to read, but a designer understands them once a finished layout sits next to them: a business card, a social post, a document.
What not to do. A page of mistakes: a stretched mark, an off-palette colour, the wrong typeface. Prohibitions save more time than permissions, because these are exactly the errors that repeat.
What turns into dead weight
A long brand story. The print contractor will not read how the name came about. A paragraph is enough.
Philosophy with no consequences. "We are bold and open" does not tell a designer which photograph to pick. A value belongs in the book only if it becomes a rule, such as "we never retouch faces" or "backgrounds are always light".
Ten variants of one mark. Every extra variant is an extra decision for the person making the layout. Have as many as there are situations, and say for each when it applies.
Rules for things that do not exist. Sections for touchpoints the company does not have and will not have make the document thicker, not more useful.
A live example: many pages, and fair enough
In the JAC Motors case the brand book ran to 78 unique pages. The number alone proves nothing, since a long brand book is easy to make useless. Here there were many touchpoints: more than thirty items, from Word and Excel documents and an email signature to flags, vehicle wraps, a display number plate and a plate frame. Each needs its own rule, and different people read them: an office employee needs one thing, an outdoor advertising contractor another. With fewer touchpoints the book could be much shorter. Length should come from the number of situations, not from a wish to look substantial.
Who keeps it current
A brand book with no owner goes stale first. New channels, formats and touchpoints appear while the document stays as it was delivered. Name one person responsible for it, and agree that a new rule is added whenever a designer had to invent one. That way the document grows with the real work rather than apart from it.
How to check yours
- Hand the book to someone who does not know the company and ask for a business card or a post. Note where they stall.
- Find the colour codes, the fonts and the minimum logo size. If it takes more than a minute, that section is buried.
- Check that the PDF has source files next to it, not just page images.
- Look at the last three things your team made: wherever the designer invented a rule, the book is missing one.
If you are still planning to commission an identity, what drives its price is covered in how much branding costs. Our approach to identity work is on the branding page.
