Brand guidelines are not just a checkbox exercise – they can save you time and money when working with designers.
A meaningful set of brand guidelines or a brand identity ensures that all your design work is on-brand and works with everything else; failure to have them can mean a design dog’s dinner.
Brand guidelines, corporate identity guidelines or a brand book?
Categorised: Brand guidelines design
Written by David Foreman.
Last updated: August 12, 2025
A brand Identity maps out the visual and vocal aspects of your brand. It is essential because without a set of professionally designed brand guidelines, designers, writers, and other creative people will have to guess what things should look and sound like.
A well-planned and meaningful set of brand guidelines sets out, at the highest level, what things look like, how you write things, what images should look like, and other aspects of your visual identity.
TL:DR – it will save you time, money and frustration.
If you don’t have these, every design job effectively starts from the beginning, every designer creates things that look different, and your brand becomes, quite frankly, a mess.
Designers use brand guidelines as a guide – a good designer will not simply follow them blindly, they will use them as a steer on what any new creative should ‘feel’ rather than precisely what it should look like.
