How to use Brand Guidelines to keep your brand on track.

The Seedhouse process comes to a close with the Finalization phase. Once we have selected a new brand logo or package design system, we finalize the files and write Brand Guidelines to responsibly shepherd the brand in the future.  These brand guidelines are a helpful and important tool in maintaining a consistent and unified look for the brand. The guides are typically 25-35 pages long and include all of the selected design elements that we created to help the logo or packaging come to life in the previous Creative Exploration and Refinements phases. 

Strategy guides deployment.

While each brand guideline is tailored to the client specific needs, typically we introduce the brand through the strategy including: the identity pyramid, positioning statement, story, brand voice and target audience definition. As a foundational tool, we establish some rules to help demonstrate  how to use the different components of the brand, including the wordmark, typography, colors, symbol, correct usage, etc..  And for packaging projects, we lay out the very detailed mechanics of how layouts are constructed and work across different structures and sizes.

The goal of the brand guidelines  is to standardize the new brand look so that anyone can successfully extend the brand look consistently across platforms and ensure that the brand will retain its character. Clients use these guidelines as both a starting point and as a tool to measure whether future creative is on-brand. We also include do’s and don’t’s to try to head off any missteps. For internal design teams, these guidelines are very useful in both developing future applications and line extensions. 

The Final Deliverables.

The final deliverable of all projects are the Brand Guide as well as the final art in many useful file formats. 

[Standard Guide for packaging files, above]

Typical file formats for Package Design projects are:

• The final art files (keylines)
• Collected images
• Fonts
• PDFs for reference

[an example of logo usage directions, above]

Typical file formats for Logo Designs are:

• Logo in full color (Illustrator, pdf, jpeg, png)
• Logo in black and white (Illustrator, pdf, jpeg, png)
• Horizontal and vertical lock-ups (Illustrator, pdf, jpeg, png)
• Wordmark alone (Illustrator, pdf, jpeg, png)
• Symbol alone (Illustrator, pdf, jpeg, png)
• Secondary wordmarks (for smaller applications like social media or web applications) (Illustrator, pdf, jpeg, png)

Read more about Brand Identity & Logo Design* Process here.
*Our process follows a similar path for Package Design projects.