Everything You Need to Know About Brand Manuals

We all by now know how powerful a brand is. In simple terms, a brand is something that tells and shows who you are. A brand sets your business aside from the rest and sells you apart from the masses. Poor branding can be catastrophic to your company, the same way better branding can lead to enormous sales and a brand name difficult impossible to forget. Unknown to many though is the fact that having a brand manual is the easiest way to creating a powerful brand. Perhaps you are not quite sure what a brand manual is, or even why you need one in particular. Don’t worry. This article will shed some light on the situation as well as to provide you with a couple of brand manual examples.

What is a Brand Manual?

A brand manual is technically a guide that keeps all your (design) intentions on the straight and narrow. It’s a document that shows you what your ‘company’s fonts’ are. Which palette of colors best embodies your business. And it also provides everyone who designs for your company, instructions on how to make sure that each piece of collateral looks like it came from the same company. You are right to sigh and say it’s not an easy task!

Why are Brand Manuals Important?

At this point, many of you may be now wary of brand manuals making business designs rather boring, or uninteresting even. That’s not entirely correct, and that is not what they are for. Brand manuals let your designers be creative by prompting him/her to focus on the bits that can add value to your business, rather than changing the fonts and colors just for the sake of being different. In short, brand manuals help keep businesses identity intact.

Additionally, brand guides help you build not only trust but also consistency with your customers thanks to the fact that with a brand manual, everything being produced is in a standard style. However, this is not to mean that everything needs to look the same, the point here is that they all ought to look like they are coming from the same company.

It goes without saying that every business, whether small, medium or corporate, needs a brand manual. A Brand manual will save you both time and money, and most importantly, it will help you project a better image; probably what every business owner needs.

Brand Manual Examples

It’s not entirely possible to outline all the brand manual examples that are currently available. However, regardless of their purpose and design, they all conform to a kind of format which centers on these six aspects:

1. Naming,
2. Logo,
3. Colors,
4. Typefaces,
5. Pictures, and
6. Lingo

What makes a good brand, is a simple name, a logo that is related to what you are doing and easy to identify, colors that are visible and easy to associate with your company, and finally, pictures that while different, are also consistent.