Maintaining a consistent visual identity is crucial for any business, regardless of size.
But, ensuring your brand remains cohesive across all channels can be challenging, especially without clear guidelines in place.
That's why establishing a comprehensive brand guide is essential.
Introducing a brand guide template streamlines this process, making it easier for your team to create on-brand, internal and external content every time.
In this guide, we provide ten professionally designed brand guidelines templates to keep your content, marketing and branding cohesive. Additionally, we offer expert tips to elevate your branding efforts, regardless of the chosen format.
Let’s get started.
A brand guidelines template is a pre-designed document, presentation or infographic that outlines essential elements for maintaining consistency in a brand’s visual and messaging identity.
A template for a brand guideline typically depicts a fictional brand. All you need to do is swap the placeholder content with yours.
A brand guideline contains everything that pertains to a brand’s essence and identity; from its core values to the color palette.
Brand guidelines are among the deliverables that result from a brand strategy and treatment.
Some brand guidelines include everything about the brand identity that has to do with the brand’s essence plus its visual identity.
In other cases, a guideline will include only its visual identity.
Let’s look at the sections in detail.
The brand essence is the fundamental quality or spirit that defines a brand, encapsulating its unique character and identity.
The visual identity includes the visual elements that represent and reinforce a brand’s image, ensuring consistency across touchpoints, content and communication strategies. This includes:
This infographic summarizes everything you should capture in a brand guideline or style guide.
When it comes to staying true to your brand, having a clear set of guidelines is key. That’s where a good brand guidelines template comes in handy.
We’ve collected 10 ready-to-customize examples to help you get started on the right foot. These templates will make it easier to communicate your brand’s values and style consistently across all your marketing material.
A brand guideline in an infographic layout is easy to browse and reference. Without the need for page turning, you can scroll to find what you need with ease. This template has a set length but you can shorten or extend it.
Adding or removing sections is easy; each section has a small control panel. Erase a block or add another from the content block gallery.
This template has sections for logo usage, a typography guide, color palettes, photo guides, tone of voice and a stationery guide. In each section, the template includes explanatory text to help the user understand how the brand elements are to be used and what to avoid.
The actual font so it's easily recognizable. The colors has hex numbers for easy access.
Additionally, the infographic includes a section that highlights the types of images that represent your brand. Upload your brand images to add in this section, or browse Visme’s vast library of stock photos and videos searching by color and mood. Use the AI Edit Tools to make changes to your photos, like removing objects and backgrounds.
When creating your brand guidelines, take it as an opportunity to showcase what branded content might look like. Similar to this template, use the brand colors, fonts and imagery as part of the design. This healthcare brand has three main colors and uses them throughout the guide. In the color section, the explanation gives insight into which color is more important.
Take control of your brand assets inside Visme. Use our Brand Wizard to generate a set of branded templates for many different purposes. After you’ve used it you’ll also have a brand kit ready to use at any time for any project.
This is exactly what the team at GaggleAMP did with Visme!
See what Ivan, their Digital Product Designer, had to say about creating branded content with their Visme Brand Kit,
It has a simple setup for the branding, but everything that’s necessary to create is in place. Then we found out that we can save our assets inside Visme, which included images, video–every kind of resource we had, which was a big win for us.
Digital Product Designer, GaggleAMP
This one-page brand guidelines template is a perfect first draft for creating a brand guidelines infographic that covers all your specific assets. Across the customized sections, share your brand’s unique perspective and story, plus any other brand rules that must be followed.
To visualize your brand story, add a section for imagery and get suggestions for visual elements by using Visme’s AI Image Generator. Include your brand colors in the prompt and create beautifully branded visuals to your guidelines, like adding color-coded icons to demonstrate their preferred use.
One of the most important aspects of a brand guideline is logo usage. This template includes all variations of a logo, starting with the primary and ending with the minimal version. It also shows color options and positioning alternatives, plus a visualization of how much empty space to leave around the logo so other elements do not invade it.
The infographic also includes details like stationery guidelines to remove any guesswork in creating content. This tech company template has a section for the company envelope, but you can add another type of branding asset using a mockup.
Easily display your letterhead, a business card or a screenshot of how an app looks on a device, with Visme’s mockup options.
This construction company's brand guidelines use a master layout so that every slide has the same base look and feel and only changes the content per slide. Having a master layout helps you add as many branded slides as you wish without having to create them from scratch.
Master layouts are even more practical when you pair them with dynamic fields. Since every slide has the same bits of content on it, it can be difficult to edit one by one. Avoid this time-wasting activity by creating custom fields for your master layouts. Then, if you need to edit something, all you need to do is edit the field and all projects with it will update automatically.
You can also save precious time when creating any sort of presentation; brand guidelines or otherwise. Visme’s AI Presentation Maker can help you create a first draft presentation in minutes. Include all the essential characteristics in the prompt and the chatbot will suggest styles to choose from.
RELATED: Creating a Professional Case Study Presentation: Templates & Tips
Elevate the effectiveness of your brand guidelines presentation by showcasing all vital brand details for your team without sacrificing space. Thanks to the versatile interactivity features in the Visme editor, you can incorporate hotspots for additional documentation.
This simple brand guidelines template for a jewelry brand is the perfect starting point for an interactive brand guidelines presentation. Each slide has all the basic information and enough space for hotspots and popups.
In the logo variation slide, for example, add a hotspot that shows the logo in a real-life scenario or inside another project. On the color slides, add a hotspot with a video highlighting color usage parameters.
This eatery brand guidelines example includes logo usage, mark integrity and typography. All you need to add are the color palettes and relevant mentions of the brand’s essence, like the mission and core values.
Keep your restaurant team on the same page about your brand, even across franchises and locations. With one unified brand guidelines document, you can ensure that everyone creating content or communication material is sticking to the rules.
Share or download your brand guidelines however you want. Download it as an image (JGP, PNG) or PDF file, or share it as a digital document in a live link that’s easy to update.
Add a password-protected entry so the document stays as internal communication and ensure that relevant parties have seen the brand guidelines using the Visme analytics dashboard.
Incorporate 3D elements into your brand identity and include them in the brand guidelines. This template includes 3D visuals as part of the brand imagery, helping visualize the content on the page. They’re color-coded to match the brand assets.
If you use these or other 3D visuals in your brand identity, Visme has many more exciting options available.
If you’re looking for other ways to include or get inspiration for your brand imagery, textures or shapes, consider generating a brand guidelines document with the AI Document Generator.
After describing your document in detail to the AI chatbot and explaining what your brand stands for and what the colors are, the AI Designer will offer a collection of styles to choose from.
Select one with interesting design elements and you’ll have a brand guidelines draft ready in no time.
This travel agency brand guidelines template uses photography to depict a sense of wanderlust in the brand identity. Getting this visual in a brand guidelines document makes it easier to portray the brand, its value and mission. Like in this example, use photography to visually tell your brand story.
When looking for images to use in your band guidelines or your brand content, use the colors as a search term. Browse through the results until you find images that match your color palette best.
Involve your team in the choice of brand assets, as they might have some they can upload as well. Setting up a unified workspace makes it easy to collaborate on the creation of your brand guidelines.
With Visme, you can invite all relevant stakeholders to join, edit and share ideas. Plus, you can leave feedback about the photography with comments and annotations.
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This document template includes all basic guidelines for logo usage, typography and color plus a letterhead example at the end. To add more pages to the document, duplicate any slide and adjust the content as needed. Use the Visme design tools to showcase different aspects of your brand in unique ways.
Take for example, a data-driven brand guidelines document with a page that visualizes the use of color with percentage widgets. For this idea, consider adding data visualizations to help transmit your branding information differently.
When working on the current or new pages of this template with your team, assign specific sections to a particular team member using the workflow feature to keep track of all essential branding information or tasks.
All brands, big or small, need brand guidelines. As soon as a company or organization has a brand identity, there needs to be a brand guideline in place.
Brand guidelines are crucial for staying true to your brand identity. With many departments or individuals creating content or building communication for a brand, the brand guidelines are the single source of truth. Without brand guidelines, the brand would lack consistency and coherence.
A brand guide and a style guide are similar in that they are both guidelines for creating content or communication material for a brand. But the difference is that to have a style guide, you need a brand guide first.
The brand guide highlights everything associated with a brand’s identity and essence. It’s the single source of truth for everything that’s created under the brand’s name. On the other hand, a style guide is a source of truth for a specific project or content piece.
Let’s say a brand is creating a website. The brand guide directs how the website will represent the brand visually and in its message. The style guide shares specifics like button shapes and section layouts.
Other names for brand guidelines are brand guide, brand style guide, brand book, brand bible and identity guidelines.
A brand guideline, or brand style guide, marks the difference between cohesive and messy visual content creation. That’s why your organization needs a brand guideline document; the single source of truth about your brand values, identity and visual aesthetics.
Having a brand guideline is the first cornerstone of brand asset management, but having a central location to keep all brand assets organized and available for use is also important.
Visme helps you create internal and external content that follows your brand guidelines every single time, plus it offers you the space to store and manage templates, logos, photography and files.
Empower your marketing team to brainstorm, plan, create and manage visual content in one convenient place.
With a Visme team account, you have access to countless collaborative business features that will help you communicate better at every brand touchpoint.
