---
title: "What belongs in a brand book, and what is dead weight"
canonical: "https://en.prostor-agency.com/blog/what-belongs-in-a-brand-book"
summary: "Who actually opens a brand book, what they need from it, and which sections turn a useful reference into a PDF that nobody reads or updates."
publishedAt: "2026-11-02"
---

## 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](/cases/jac) 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](/blog/branding-cost). Our approach to
identity work is on the [branding](/services/branding) page.