Building Your Brand Assets

Contents:

• Introduction
• Brand Name
• Brand Story
• Brand Color
• Brand Typography
• Brand’s Tone of Voice
• Brand Imagery
• Brand Iconography
• Brand Illustrations/Graphics/Tessellations
• Brand Style Guide
• Sample Brand Style Guide

Introduction

“Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room”

– Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO

Your brand is, and should be unique. It should stand out from others in a similar business or service. What makes your brand so different? It's your unique promise and value that you provide to your customers and clients. But how do you communicate this to your potential network? Through branding.

We all remember the Nike swoosh. So much so that now Nike has stopped writing its brand name beside it. Same is the case with Apple Inc. We've developed such a strong brand recall for these symbols that we don't need any extra information to identify these brands. That's the power of brand assets. You brand assets are your exclusive secret ingredients to prepare a successful brand.

Like humans, brands have a character. Like us, they need to have a style, a dressing sense, and a style of communication to grab people's attention. In this article, we'll get into the depth of each of the brand assets from brand name, story, logo, colors, typography, tone of voice, imagery, iconography, illustrations to compiling them in a holy brand style guide. It'll be an exciting journey.

If you're a brand strategist, marketer, brand agency team member, at a manager post, a business owner, or an entrepreneur looking to establish your business as a brand, this is for you.

If you're a young design or business graduate struggling to understand the practical applications of your theory classes in Branding and Marketing, this is for you.

If you're a 9-5 stuck employee at a stressful job and willing to set up your own business or brand but don't have the capital to invest in building your brand, this will help you construct it.

In my previous book, 'BYOB Building Your Own Brand', we talked about the first steps towards creating a brand strategy, value proposition statement, brand character, and the various types of brand logos. this article is a continuation of where we left in the last book.

Although you can read this article without going through the previous book, I would recommend you to read that too if you wish to gain a better foundation in brand building.

Here we will understand what a particular brand asset is used for, how it needs to be created, where it should be used, and how to make it a successful brand asset, that evokes a strong brand recall in the minds of your audience. All the chapters are supported by examples from brands all over the world.

The last chapter focuses on compiling the valuable brand assets in the form of a style guide with guidelines, descriptions, information, standards, best practices, do's and don'ts, and instructions for anyone who will be involved in brand building exercises.

A strong visual identity is the need for a modern brand to evolve in this digital era, and a necessity for a legacy brand to continue growing business. Over 90% of businesses around the world today depend on highly aesthetical and meaningful visual communication. How do we achieve this? With all the visual and emotional clutter filling the digital space and no one really looking at your advertisements anymore. How do we attract people and hook them to your brand?

We do it by providing them value. Value through an exclusive visual means of communication. How is your brand name unique and catchy? What's your brand's story that will attract them to a bigger purpose than mere business? People don't buy products and services; they buy stories they associate themselves with.

How does your brand logo stand out amongst the competition? Does it have a hidden meaning? Do people see a color in their surroundings and does it remind them of your brand?

How does your brand message look on social media? Do you use a unique font developed specifically for your brand?

Why do all of your brand photographs appear in stark contrast black and white? Is there a story or inspiration behind it because your audience loves it? How do your team members communicate with your clients on a daily basis? Is there a unique style to it which stays with them for long after the conversations are finished?

What's so different about the icons used in your mobile app and website with a tint of gold? Did you get the designers on board to design them specially for your brand?

Obviously, there's something particular about how your brand dresses up to perform in front of your audience. These accessories, it wears, are your brand's assets and, in this article, you'll discover how to make them.

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Brand Name

Struggling to come up with an original yet great name for your initiative?

“A brand is no longer what we tell the consumer it is—it is what consumers tell each other it is.”

– Scott Cook

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak (founders of Apple Computers) were running late for an exhibition where they were to present their prototype for a revolutionary personal computer. On their way they were supposed to come up with a name for their startup as they were pretty busy with the prototype that they almost forgot about the name.

Steve Wozniak thought of something similar to a geeky, Battlestar Computer Peripherals Pvt. Ltd., because he was a genius computer nerd. To this, Jobs laughed so hard and told Wozniak that it was the most horrible and cliched name for a company that’s about to change the world. Woz was confused.  Jobs had a vision for Apple which was to ‘put a dent in the universe’. While Wozniak was thinking of a generic business name for their exhibition, Jobs was trying to come up with a unique brand name.

Jobs wanted to name the brand as synonymous to something that everyone would want to have as soon as they look at it. Jobs exclaimed, “What’s the one thing that lies on your dinner table and as soon as you lay your eyes on them, you want to, have it? An Apple. You look at an apple and you can’t resist taking a bite.” This is how Apple Computers was named and stole the show at every exhibition they presented their prototypes. This is the power of a well thought brand name.

So, what’s the first quality of a great brand name? It should stem from a great story. Often the founders name their companies after their own name followed by a suffix. Now many of you might disagree with this practice but I’ll tell you how this works great for some businesses.

Brands are like human manifestations and they also possess personalities. So, if your brand is identified by the founder’s name who himself/herself has a great story to narrate, like that of rags to riches or of struggle, then this works like magic.

We have several renowned brands across the world whose brand names are associated by people like Tesla, Ford, Bjarke Ingles, Mahindra, Tata, Adani, etc. Their brand names narrate the stories of perseverance, hard work and consistent effort to build their organizations from scratch.

Your brand name should be short, easy to comprehend and memorable. Imagine if one of the world’s largest artificial intelligence companies named their brand as Strategic Alliance of Artificial Intelligence Experts and Machine Learning Technicians Limited. Not a great brand name, right?

You would forget about it as soon you leave their mind-blowing speech at a seminar. How will you now tell your colleagues where you were this weekend and which AI company you admire the most? You might recall it as synonymous to the next Google or the future acquisition of Tesla. But you won’t be able to recall the exact brand name. For this reason, you ought to come up with a brand name that rolls off the tongue without too many syllables involved. If it’s impossible to come up with a single word name, create a monogram or a short form which again, should be easy to recall like IBM, BMW, SHIELD, etc.

Your brand name should be in a universally spoken language unless you’re targeting an audience in a specific region with an indigenous language. Remember if your brand name is ‘Sadhana’ meaning dedicated learning in a religion, and your business goal is to sell exotic French hamburgers, then you better not be depressed when French customers walk by your store confused by an American product and an Indian origin brand name.

A great brand name always follows the law of bisociation. This is where the name is associated with another naturally existing entity or concept. We read about this in the beginning of this chapter where we saw the powerful symbolic association of Apple, the forbidden fruit to a computer company. This not only allows the business to create a memorable and widely understood brand name but also allows the business to expand in ventures beyond their initial line of expertise.

Google is no longer focused on being the fastest search engine. Apple is no longer perfecting its range of personal computers only. Amazon is no longer selling only books on its website. YouTube is no longer a dating site.

An open-ended non-specific brand name allows the business to expand into the most trending business opportunities and adapt to the constantly transforming market scenarios. This is how some brands manage to stay in business even when the demand for their traditional product/services drops down.

Key considerations:

1. Name is for life meaning it should stay. Name changes aren't good for businesses or changing any domain names as they tend to be rare.
2. Trademarking. Make sure the brand name isn't already trademarked by another business or you'll face serious legal charges.
3. Emotional Value. What pops up in your audience's mind when they hear your brand name? What type of company or products or Service do they imagine when they hear it?
4. Associations. Is the brand name already associated with negative emotions or feelings? Something you're not aware of yet. Make sure it doesn't conjure up any strange imagery.

Types of brand names:

1. Founder names. E.g., Ford, Mahindra, Tata
2. Literary Games. E.g., Anagrams, Palindromes
3. By what you do. E.g., Jet airways, Gelato
4. Out of context or symbolic. E.g., Apple.
5. Invented word. E.g., Etsy, FedEx
6. Double Trouble. E.g., Breadbread
7. Experience. E.g., Whizz(air)

Steps to build a brand name:

A. Brainstorming and gathering ideas.

1. Brands you admire. Make a list of all the brands you like and look into their origins by digging deep. This is the research phase.
2. Prepare your own list. Write down all the words that come to your mind when you think about your business or product or service. Don't Stop yourself here. Let them flow.
3. Word sites and thesaurus. Use them to look for words. As many as possible. But relevant and exciting. Words that ignite an emotional response as soon as you read them.
4. Keywords and SEO research. Write down all the major keywords associated with your brand. Use Google Keywords search for any other tool for this.

B. Check almost everything. 

1. Check domain names. Check if your domain name is available. Settling for a substandard or difficult domain name will cost you clients in the long run. Don't settle for dashes or hyphens in them. No one has the time to type in the correct complex name.
2. Dictionary Check. Make sure you check all the possible meanings and associations with the chosen name. It's to be sure of any negative connotations or offensive meanings.
3. Google it now. Are there already too many search results or brand names similar to yours? Make sure it has no massive headlines associated with the chosen in the past decade.
4. Language swap. Does it sound equally exciting in another language when spoken? Does your invented word already exist in another language and means something offensive?

C. You need to human proof it.

1. The noisy bar test. You walk into a very noisy bar and you introduce your newly found brand to your friends. Can they remember it? Pronounce it well? Spell it well?
2. Readability test. Check your brand name for ease of readability. You can use online tools for this too. If it's not easily readable, people will forget about it sooner than you think and you'll lose potential customers through word of mouth.
3. Apply common sense. Keep your invented brand names short and crisp like eBay and etsy. Keep them crazy long and people won't be able to say them, forget about remembering.

Once you've double checked all the stages, it's time to register your brand name. Probably get a trademark or copyright if possible and affordable. You need to find a way to protect it in the long run to prevent other budding businesses from applying for a trademark in later stages and robbing you off of your potential clients. You're good to go.

Lastly, don’t go overboard in coming up with the brand name that’ll miraculously save your business from drowning. It won’t fix the holes in your business processes but it can surely reinforce its brand identity. Don’t spend an eternity in looking for the perfect name and try to create one that ignites an interesting story to hook the audience, a natural phenomenon or a strong emotion when brought in front of your target audience.

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Brand Story

Struggling to tell the most compelling story of brand’s existence?

“A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.”

– Seth Godin

What does your brand stand for? How did your brand come into existence? What is the reason your brand is still in business? What keeps you and your team working towards building your business?

Questions like these need to be answered before we jump on the next step in ‘Building Your Own Brand’. These are necessary to narrate a brand story to your clients and customers. You may ask why?

Well, storytelling has been recently romanticized by a lot of entrepreneurs as the most powerful weapon in building a successful startup. But the truth is stories have always been the decision-making factor for us humans.

We don’t buy products, we buy stories. These stories make us feel pretty, healthy, slim, respected, wealthy, exotic, and we let our emotions make purchasing decisions for us.

I remember while growing up in a middle-class Indian society I was constantly reminded that getting into a reputed engineering college was the only way to become successful in life. This was exploited by coaching centers that sprouted across the nation like wildfire.

Millions of students started lining up for entrance tests for coaching centers for the final entrance tests of engineering colleges. What a circus!

Their businesses directed their entire marketing campaigns towards selling the dream of studying in some of the most premier institutes in India.

They sold stories of their students who, in reality, cleared the entrance exams based on their personal caliber. They lured in innocent parents who were ready to give away their hard-earned money for a foggy dream.

Now this wasn’t exactly a great example of a brand story but it’s here to show you the power of leveraging the aspirations of middle-class Indian families. Although, this was an unethical way to craft a brand, it still works pretty well.

One of the greatest examples of a well curated brand story that I’ve come across is that of Amul Milk Industries. Amul India began with a social yet innovative initiative which empowered women from local villages of Gujarat to earn a decent livelihood by selling off the extra milk produced in their homes by their personal cattle to the nearby Amul milk factories.

Amul as a brand empowers the unorganized sectors, has been the most trustworthy milk product company, adheres to all ethical practices and promotes health and wellness for Indian citizens. Similar is the story of several other Indian brands such as Lijjat Papad (thin crisp snacks made out of wheat), MDH Spices and many more.

Your brand story is not what you do or what you make. It is why you do what you do or make.

If it’s not interesting then you need to rethink the existence of your business. Just kidding. Most of the times when I’ve spoken to business owners, they are unaware of their brand story or feel this as a waste of time and effort. They often say, “We are in business because we want to make money. We need to survive in this city that’s why we started this company. We didn’t know anything else to do. It’s a successful business model used by everyone in our industry. We make really good machines. We are very skilled. Maybe that can be our brand story.”

If any of those sentences pop up in a branding session, then we have two paths to follow. We either walk away and focus on creating a meaningful business model which doesn’t merely run on the motive to make more money or gain fame but on actual values which pushes each and every team member to be motivated when he/she wakes up next Monday.

The other option is to reinforce the branding sessions by extracting a brand story deliberately from the business owners. This can be done through a rigorous interview session with all of the team members, current and past. Chances are there that the team members are unable to fill out any questionnaires you throw at them. It’s not their fault. Not everyone is aware of the true meaning of brand values or attributes. It is at this point you need to explain the interview to them. Consider this as a therapy session for those boring business owners who are too lazy to narrate their brand story.

But what to ask in those interviews? Ask about the journey of the business.

How did it start? What motivated the founders to start it in the first place? How did they get their first sales or client? How was the journey from there? How did it evolve? What were the values that remained constant during the growth?

Ask about the failures and the lessons learnt from them. What makes the business going even today? What if the world shuts down tomorrow, how will it adapt?

They must have a mission for which the team members work every day and it shouldn't be money or fame alone but for a non-personal greater good. They must have a long-term vision which again shouldn’t be to get rich or famous.

Dig out the qualities of the team members and the qualities they look for when hiring new people. Look for any signs of attributes, qualities, values, and behaviors that have been consistent in their business. Look for patterns and voila you have your brand story.

How to Present the Story?

Now you’ve got yourself a brand story out of the business in a fuzzy cloud above your head. How do you present this brand story to the world and generate more business? This is the tricky part as there is no defined way to present your brand story.

The most common way is to write it down in the form of a brief paragraph. This can work as a section on your brand’s website, description on your brand’s social media accounts and in other brand publications. Take utmost care while crafting this piece because it will be highly unprofessional to edit it again and again. Get it proofread and reviewed by brand professionals or even your known clients or customers.

Some uncommon yet unique ways to present your brand story are:

• 1. Video Story

Video content is more engaging nowadays and with the exponential rise of YouTube and other video platforms, it only makes sense to craft an interesting brand video story. It can be as rudimentary as a quick trailer with simple text or photographs or it can be too complicated with motion graphics, interviews, narrations, testimonials, work samples, history and evolution and what not. The choice is yours as the quality of a video story will depend on time, budget and finding the right person or agency to do a mind-blowing job. You can look up some great video stories of Nike and GoPro on YouTube.

• 2. Infographic

With the advent of graphic design becoming the go-to tool for storytelling, a lot of brands narrate their brand stories through creative infographics depicting their brand character, values, mission and vision. These might take an added effort of designing custom illustrations and the final infographics. But once designed, it can serve as a strong visual cue for people who admire brands that keep their visual game strong.

• 3. Photo Collage or Stylescape or Mood board

If you’re from a design background, you must have heard about mood boards. It’s a composition of visual elements such as photos, graphics, artworks, messages, type, etc. that best represents a brand. If your business is not a creative agency, you might not have many visuals to go with this option. But fear not, because if you have brand values in place, you can select a couple of royalty free images which reflect those values best for your business. These images should define your brand in bits and pieces and the mood board as a whole can serve as an inspiration and your brand story.

Step by Step Guide to Writing a Brand Story

• 1. What’s your Story's Conflict?

Read the following story. A young girl wearing a red-hooded cloak is walking through the woods to provide her ill grandmother some food. She crosses a wolf on the way. They exchange an awkward smile which office mates greet each other with as they pass each other in the corridor. She reaches her grandmother’s house without any problem. They eat dinner and play a game of chess together. Grandmother wins. The End.

How does this story make you feel? Did this tale push you to the edge of your seat? Or, does it feel a bit off? It doesn’t work like a story, right? It’s because there’s no conflict in this story. There’s nothing at stake in this. There’s no tension in this. So much so, the wolf doesn’t try to eat the girl. He didn’t even follow her to grandmother’s house. There’s no talk about The Little Red Riding Hood.

At their core, stories are about overpowering difficulty or conflict. So, if there’s no conflict offered, there’s no drama or emotional journey that the audience can relate to. It won’t grasp anyone’s attention, let alone resonate with and stir them.

Regrettably, in the business world, brands are afraid to reveal any problem or conflict they’ve confronted. They believe that whirling a healthy, blemish-free story about how their business only experiences growth will convince people that they’re the industry’s best-in-class solution. Any adversity or conflict during their company’s history will expose their deficiencies, deterring probable customers from buying their product.

But, in reality, this is a huge delusion. Nothing’s perfect. Everything, including companies (especially companies), has faults.

Plus, people don’t relate to faultlessness. They relate to the expressive journey of experiencing adversity, fighting through it, and, ultimately, overcoming it. Because, in a nutshell, that’s the everyday story of life.

Conflict is crucial to telling persuasive stories. So be transparent about the hardship your company has faced, and own it. The more authentic you are about your shortcomings; the more people will respect you and narrate to your brand.

• 2. Your story’s status quo and resolution.

Conflict isn’t the only item you should emphasize on when crafting your brand story. A persuasive story has two other elements - the status quo and resolution.

The status quo is the way things are already or the initiating nature of the situation. The conflict disrupts this status quo and puts something at stake, forcing the protagonist (which is your brand) to actively find a resolution to this problem. The resolution describes how the protagonist resolves the problem, giving your spectators an emotional settlement. A brand’s story structure should appear like this - status quo, conflict, and resolution. It’s as simple, isn’t it?

Let’s go over the real Little Red Riding Hood story, as well as some imaginary brands to understand how this structure works.

The Little Red Riding Hood

Status Quo: Little Red Riding Hood strides through the forests, on her way to deliver food to her sick grandmother.

Conflict: A Big Bad Wolf reaches for her, and asks where she’s going. She innocently tells him where her grandmother’s house is, so he advises her to pick some flowers as a present for her. While she’s distracted, he disrupts Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother's house, eats her, and puts on her clothes to impersonate her. When Little Red Riding Hood reaches her grandmother’s house, she observes some changes in her grandmother's appearance but ultimately neglects them and hops into the bed with her. The wolf eats her up. He falls asleep from a massively heavy stomach.

Resolution: A nearby hunter hears Little Red Riding Hood’s screams, kicks through grandmother’s door, and cuts open the wolf’s stomach, freeing Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother free. They then stuff the wolf’s body with heavy stones, and when he wakes and attempts to run away, he topples over and ultimately dies.

Now isn’t this an exciting story? A compelling one, perhaps? It raises your concern, you become surprised at the twist of events and ultimately it keeps you off the edge of your sofa. Now, the thing is, some small brands are leveraging this same exact story structure to create massive amounts of brand awareness and affinity.

Brand Story Examples

1. BadaBoom Media Solutions (made up)

This is a creative agency that produces unique, narrative-driven podcasts for B2B brands. Their mission is to generate refreshing, entertaining shows for clients that can retain people’s attention for a long time, not just acquire it for a short period of time.

Their Status Quo: As creators and marketers, we want our audience’s attention, and so for years, we focused our energies on acquiring it.

Conflict: But today, cheers to multiple screens, ubiquitous and instantly available content, and endless choice in nearly every competitive niche, the buyer now has total control. They only choose experiences they sincerely enjoy. It is no longer sufficient for us to simply acquire our audience's attention.

Resolution: We have to hold it. That is our new directive as makers and marketers. We need to swing our focus from impressions and traffic to subscribers and community. Everything we are trying to achieve becomes probable and gets easier when our audience spends minutes or even hours with us, not seconds. Don't just attain attention. Hold it for long.

3.       Tell your brand’s real story, not a fiction tale.

Whether you’re issuing your brand story on your website or using it to enlighten your overall mission, please make sure it’s fact, not fiction. Spluttering out a highlight reel, like almost every other brand on the corner does, won’t really reverberate with people. Instead, it's critical you tell the honest truth about the hardship your company has faced, and how you’re occupied to overcome it. Because what people really relate to and get inspired by isn’t limitless success but it’s the rollercoaster journey of chasing a goal, getting knocked down, and, eventually, finding a small trail towards success.

Real Brand Story Examples:

1. Go Pro

In a letter from founder and CEO Nicholas Woodman on the GoPro site, he writes, “GoPro helps people capture and share their lives’ most meaningful experiences with others – to celebrate them together. Like how a day on the mountain with friends is more meaningful than one spent alone, the sharing of our collective experiences makes our lives more fun. The world’s most versatile cameras are what we make. Enabling you to share your life through incredible photos and videos is what we do.”

2.Uber

Uber tells its story by saying that it is evolving the way the world around us moves. “By seamlessly connecting riders to drivers through our apps, we make cities more accessible, opening up more possibilities for riders and more business for drivers,” the brand says.

3. Airbnb

Airbnb says it is a trusted community marketplace for consumers to list, discover, and book unique accommodations for unique travel experiences.

4.Virgin America

Virgin America says its mission is to make flying good again, with new planes, attractive fares, top-notch service and a host of amenities that reinvent domestic air travel. “The Virgin America experience is unlike any other in the skies, featuring mood-lit cabins with Wi-Fi, custom-designed leather seats, power outlets and a video touch-screen at every seatback offering guests on-demand menus and countless entertainment options,” the brand adds.

So, after creating your brand story you need to promote it and display it on as many channels as possible. Begin your client pitch meetings by introducing your brand by your brand story and not your boring business intentions. Talk to your network about this brand story. Publish it on your brand website, company profile, digital, social and print media. Conduct an induction session for your team members inspiring them with this brand story.

Share this story with as many people as possible and in years to come you’ll hear it back from all trusted clients and customers. People will make this story a part of their dinner conversations, inspiring speeches, teaching material and the word of mouth will bring you those clients whom you once dreamt of chasing behind closed elevator doors.

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Brand Color

What's the color of clothes your brand wears to the party?

“Design is the silent ambassador of your brand.”

– Paul Rand

You might be wondering how color affects your business or brand. Having a brand color palette will surely not help in increasing your monthly sales but will significantly help in establishing your brand’s style. This will further reinforce your brand’s identity and people will be able to associate and identify a color with your brand.

Human beings at heart are simple emotional creatures who relate the most with symbols, text and colors. If you were to get in the depth of color psychology you would realize that each and every color is linked with a set of emotions and meanings. For instance, red is associated with passion, energy, warning, etc. and green is to growth and learning. There are obviously cultural and geographical variations to the meanings of these colors. But as a brand designer you need to harness the emotional manipulation capabilities of colors to enhance your brand’s value.

How to select your brand colors?

There are more than a million colors available on the color wheel. So, which one do you choose? And what should you consider while selecting them? The first step is to go back to your brand values and reflect on the kind of business that you’re into. The trick here is to find out one primary color that defines your brand and sets you apart from the rest of businesses in competition.

You will obviously need to do a little bit of research on the color psychology to select one that resonates with what your brand stands for. Because if you don’t, you will be unable to justify the color choice and in the long run your desired customers might get a wrong impression from your brand colors.

For instance, imagine you’re building the brand for a finance related organization and your color palettes full of bright neon, red, yellow and green. Do you think this is a justified choice for a business whose customers are serious professionals looking for someone to handle their hard-earned money? Obviously not your customer personas will come in handy when choosing a color palette.

After you’ve decided upon the primary color of your brand, you need to select some secondary and tertiary colors which will help form an interesting color palette that can create a unique identity. Going for these extras is important in the modern times where your brand cannot own a single color as it has been already by classic giants over the last few decades. Also, having a few extra colors in your palette will help you create a visual hierarchy on your several brand touchpoints like website, publications and social media.

Make sure you’re not selecting more than 3 colors for your brand as more colors can mean visual confusion for your audience. These colors cannot be a randomly chosen mess. The colors need to be in harmony with each other.

To read more about color harmony, you can read my book ‘Visual Dialogues 101: Graphic Design Fundamentals’.

These colors can be either monochromatic, contemporary, analogous, etc. for this you might have to look for mockups and examples of how the different colors will look with each other.

If the combination doesn't work out well or you’re convinced that just one color is sufficient for your brand, you can prepare a color palette by combining the primary color with neutral greys which is a very well-practiced solution.

Every color has a numerical identity. You cannot just claim the color pale green as your brand’s color. You need to identify a specific green with a unique RGB, CMYK, HEX, Pantone and HTML code.

This is necessary not for your customers but for the designers and creators of your brand assets. Your brand’s website will require a six-digit code to display it on your screen and similarly all design software require a code input for colors to create publications and social media posts.

These identification codes will go into the brand style guide so that it can be referenced by everyone who creates a collateral for the brand in future.

We will discuss creating the brand style guide once we cover each of its content in detail.

You won’t realize the significance of establishing brand colors in the first few months. But as your brand grows, you’ll realize people will subconsciously recall your brand’s message through a particular color they consistently sway through your marketing campaigns.

People might never talk about it but their visual consciousness helps them remember that the next time they see an advertisement by Netflix, they’ll feel rewarded for expecting it to be in the combination of red and black.

It’s easy to understand this if you consider a brand as an embodiment of a famous personality like actors or politicians. We all identify Steve Jobs as the guy who always wears a black T-shirt and denim jeans.

Think of your brand colors as the colors of clothes your brand wears whenever it’s on stage performing.

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Brand Typography

Why doesn't your brand use a unique font for those letters?

“Branded content is created for a company. A content brand is created for a valuable company.”

– Drew Davis

Did you use ‘Times New Roman’ font to write that client pitch presentation? Have you been doing that since the last ten years since you’ve been in business? I know you must be wondering what’s the point of discussing your choice of fonts while pitching for new projects from your clients. You are a part of a professional organization and you just can’t afford to spend any time or effort in going for a decorative font. Plus, it might look very unprofessional. I get your resentment but for a minute just hear me out.

We’ll begin by knowing the true meaning of brand typography. Typography, in the simplest terms, is the design of text-based characters to evoke an emotion or convey a particular style. It is one of the pillars of graphics design (other two being layout and color).

Now every brand is associated with a visual style developed on certain values through a process called brand strategy. So, to reinforce this brand style or brand identity through a visual tool (fonts) is called brand typography.

In much simpler terms, brand typography is a deliberate choice of fonts, their sizes, variations in weights, and usage guidelines to stand apart from other similar businesses. This establishes a strong and sustainable brand recall while delivering your brand’s messages.

Brands across the world go through this exercise to carefully select a typeface (typeface is the collection of fonts for example Poppins is a typeface and Poppins Bold is a font) that reflects their brand values.

Some brands go to the extent of creating their own typeface which gives them the right to own their brand typography for instance IBM has the typeface IBM Plex. This not only sets them apart from other brands but is also an evergreen technique to strengthen the brand recall in future. Today IBM’s fonts are freely available on Google fonts but when another brand attempts to use this font, it will further add to the brand identity of IBM by that organization.

You must be wondering that all the multinational businesses have a brand typography but why is it needed for a smaller organization or a local brand? Allow me to burst the bubble for you.

We’re living in the golden age of technology, information and media. We’re consuming visual media at an alarmingly high rate every second through our digital devices. Gone are the days when billboards, newspapers and shop fronts were the only places one could advertise his/her business.

Currently, everyone on the internet is practicing personal branding on social media that too for no operational cost and little effort. With all this ease of digital marketing, businesses that don’t establish a strong visual identity on the internet will be thrown behind by those who do!

You might be the best manufacturer of fountain pens in the world but until and unless you transform your business into a brand and convey your brand story in style, you’ll just be another pen-maker.

Typography is one of the strongest tools out there with imagery and color to stylize your brand’s communication.

I hope by now you’re convinced by the power and magic of brand typography. Now allow me to tell you what exactly needs to be done and how to do it.

First of all, you need to decide whether to go for a stock typeface (pre-designed, paid and free packages) or to hire a graphic designer to create your own customized typeface.

Bring up your brand values and understand the nature of your business. If it’s serious, professional, and corporate based, you can opt for sans-serif or geometrical fonts. If it’s casual, traditional or targeted towards the everyday public, you can opt for a serif or decorative typeface.

If you want to dive deeper into the topic of typography, you can refer to my previously published book: ‘Visual Dialogues 101: Graphic Design Fundamentals’.

There are certain factors to consider while choosing brand typography, such as:

1. Stick to a maximum of two typefaces for your brand.

Choose one display font to serve as a hierarchy of headings on various brand touchpoints. Play around with several weights of the same heading font to establish an interesting hierarchy thereby informing the viewers where to look. The second font should be a complementary to the primary font. This will serve as the typeface for your paragraphs in your various communication channels. You can look up great font pairings at Google fonts or Adobe fonts.

2. The chosen typeface should be readable and legible.

There are millions of fonts out there on the internet. Most of them are never used because of their complications. The first and foremost consideration should be to avoid if they are too confusing, artistic or decorative to distract the viewer from the written content. The last thing you would want is to find out decades later that your email newsletter was never read by the target audience because it was too difficult to read.

Lastly, I would advise you to take an opinion of a professional graphic designer or communication designer when selecting brand typography. Make sure to set strong guidelines for all team members to follow while preparing documents or digital content.

This will be discussed elaborately in the chapter on ‘Brand Style Guide’ where we will talk about how to set the various sizes for different media and how to ensure it is followed consistently throughout the brand touchpoints. Till then explore the perfect font pair suited for your business.

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Brand’s Tone of Voice

How does your brand speak to your potential customers?

“A brand’s strength is built upon its determination to promote its own distinctive values and mission.”

– Jean-Noel Kapferer

Imagine you’re going for a meeting with a potential client who is probably looking for an opportunity to invest in a young startup company. But the investor is very picky and in the past few years no one has actually been able to convince him to invest. This obviously makes you nervous as you’re stuck in the traffic.

You know your idea is great and it will surely generate marvelous results in the short term. Your team has worked very hard to put together a visual presentation to assist your startup pitch meeting.

As soon as you begin the slideshow full of data visualizations, portfolio of works and what not, the investors are no longer interested in looking at the screen; they want to hear you talk about the idea. They want you to impress them with your words. Now here are ten investors sitting on millions of dollars looking for an investment opportunity.

Do you think a casual tone will work with these people? Do you think they’ll be impressed if you open up your pitch with what you do, how you’ve been doing it and how some numbers predict that your industry might be successful in the coming years? Absolutely not.

It’ll probably get you kicked out of the conference room via the tenth-floor window. Your audience here is looking for an entrepreneurial spirit and a tone of trust and inspiration. They’re not looking for numbers or data. They’re looking for stories, values, vision of your team, a purpose and a belief of success in your tone of voice. They don’t want to smell doubt in your clothes and greed in your voice.

Every great brand, like every great human being, has a unique tone of voice. In simpler terms, the choice of words for your brand’s communication both internal and external is your brand’s tone of voice.

It covers all sorts of communication channels such as mailing your clients or customers and co-workers, servicing your customers, handling complaints and grievances, speaking about your brand at business meetings or conferences or seminars, introducing your brand to potential networks, and communications through cross cultural boundaries.

There’s no hard and fast rule applied to a brand’s tone of voice. One can specify certain guidelines related to quality, language, dos and don’ts or one can go to the extent of creating templates for every form of communication to be used by the team members.

For instance, while I was helping a professional design agency set up their brand, creating the brand's tone of voice was the trickiest part.

It’s because there’s no practical or tangible way to identify and coordinate the correct usage of a tone of voice. I was able to identify that the design agency had to follow English UK Standards because most of their clients were based out of the UK and Africa.

Along with this the agency was supposed to use a warm, professional, fact based, technical, inspiring and a humble tone which was derived after going through their customer personas who were people with lump sum investments in their businesses looking for serious designers who would help them solve their problems.

Most of their client communication was happening through emails and video calls so they had to have some serious guidelines set to ensure these were of top quality.

One technique to create a successful brand’s tone of voice is to create an imaginary script of conversations between your ideal client or customer and your team member or even amongst your team members (this although should be directed towards the brand mission).

While creating the imaginary script, direct it in a way that enhances client’s or customer’s experience and reinforces or reflects the brand values repeatedly. Remember when the various tech or finance sector service call center technicians greet you with a unique phrase and then as the call ends, they utter their company’s motto every single time.

Many service people might say this cheerfully but often it seems forced. This reinforces the brand tagline in your mind as you continue to take more of their services. Now this practice is almost extinct but this is often visible in all the emails we receive on a daily basis.

This is yet another powerful tool to establish an evocative brand identity.

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Brand Imagery

How does your brand use photographs to convey your compelling brand values?

“Brand is just a perception, and perception will match reality over time.”

– Elon Musk

Does your brand use image to communicate ideas and messages? If not, maybe you should rethink that for a moment. We’re living in a world surrounded by photographs and graphics right from our smartphones and televisions to billboards and publications. An image speaks louder than any kind of long form text. Show a kid a harry potter movie and tell him to read one of the novels. If the kid is book-lover, he will surely prefer the novel but every other kid of his age would surely prefer the mind-blowing visuals of the movie.

Every brand uses a certain type of images to communicate their brand’s values and associations. A sports brand communicates the sportsmanship spirit demonstrated by visuals from a particular sport. For instance, Nike is known to celebrate the exclusive sportsmen/women by displaying their victories as a part of their advertisements. Similarly, Coca-Cola endorses several Bollywood superstars in India drinking a bottle of coke because this sort of imagery convinces their target audience in India to buy their product more and more. This is the power of a strong and consistent brand imagery and its association.

Each and every sector these days has a set of images to portray on their brand touchpoints. For instance, a visual centric industry such as Architecture and Construction can leverage the power of visuals from their designs, sketches, drawings, details, construction progress, collaborative team efforts, documentation, behind the scenes, and built photographs of the buildings. While there are several visual centric industries which exploit their own images, there are some with a lack of photographs.

Several government organizations, non-profit welfare services, manufacturing industries, healthcare, finance, etc. sectors are not in the business to create their own visuals unlike creative industries. But does this mean they won’t have a chance to build their brand imagery? Absolutely not.

We’re living in a time where brands can leverage images available for download on the internet without any copyright license. These are known as ‘Royalty Free Images’ and available for free or for a certain price for some exclusive photographs. Many brands use them to begin their branding journey and later on as they grow their business, switch to personalized visuals.

Just because you have a million royalty free images in front of you, doesn’t mean you ought to use all of them in your communication. Your brand’s imagery should be guided by a set of standards and guidelines. These will help the team members and any future hires involved in brand communication to follow a consistent visual language. For instance, if you decide to use black and white photographs of your team and any historic event in your brand’s publication, then this needs to be followed throughout the media channels. This not only removes the confusion every time a new image has to be released, but also helps your brand set itself apart from the rest of the crowd.

Again, like a brand’s tone of voice, brand imagery has no set of defined rules to follow. You can begin by creating a mood board of images that reflect your brand.

Then you can create a directory or bank of images to be used in the beginning to establish a style. Then you can go to the advanced step of writing down guidelines to be used by photographers, graphic designers, art directors for further style and usage of brand imagery. These can be the orientation (landscape or portrait or square), overlay color (monotone, duotone or full color), a particular mood to be reflected, lighting, a set of colors to be used somewhere in the compositions, logo or watermark to be added, daytime or nighttime shots, overall warmth or cold colors, portraits to be captured with a smile or look or pose, object or person doing a particular activity which is to be repeated by everyone, background and foreground, size of the images as per different presentation media, and many more.

These were only a couple of guidelines which I could recall from my experience. But you could explore more options after going through a brainstorming session with business owners, photographers, designers and other stakeholders. Branding is always a collective effort and never to be explored in isolation amongst the top management personnel. You never know what the three-month-old interns bring to the table when you’re busy looking for that perfect brand imagery.

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Brand Iconography

Use a unique style of symbols to communicate your brand's identity!

It’s well said that nothing in the universe is new and history repeats itself. Society evolved from being hunters and gatherers to farmers to metal miners to industrial workers to corporate slaves. Today we see the transition from mundane jobs to personal businesses and a profound shift towards agriculture through new ways of farming and fishing.

Similarly, visual communication in our society began with cave paintings and ancient hieroglyphs since the Egyptian civilization. Today, with the advent of digital interfaces we’re using a similar symbolic language

to communicate the most complex messages.

As the smartphones and personal computers forced elaborate functions to be displayed on a small screen, text was no longer a feasible option to convey the function and response.

Soon came the use of icons to convey complex computing functions which were easily understood by the non-technical public as most of them were associated with everyday objects. This association of conventional icons as being relatable to the generation before computers and not being relatable to the millennials or Gen X is a debatable topic.

Icons are compact, minimal, indicative and easy to comprehend graphic illustrations often found on digital interfaces to convey or reinforce a message or function visually. They are often available on free and paid online libraries but often are custom designed for a particular brand. Iconography is the process of creating and curating a selection of icons to be used by a brand on their brand assets.

You might be wondering how do we create a collection of icons and how will that impact the overall brand identity? Icons are tricky graphic illustrations. Just because they seem really simple doesn’t mean they don’t take a significant time and effort to make them as communicative as possible. The standard icons used universally over all the web interfaces were at some time new to the public but with time and consistency they’re now embedded into our subconscious minds. For instance, the mail icon, like button, arrow icons, calendar, etc. are just to name a few standard ones.

Your brand needs to stand out in every visual way possible. So, you need a set of icons that are not only unique in their design but also creates a sense of familiarity amongst your audience.

You don’t want to overdesign the mail icon on your website to an extent that it looks more like a dull black rectangle and nothing like the mail we received years ago in our mailboxes. This balance of unique brand iconography and respecting the traditional visual communication is what we’re thriving for.

A brand iconography can be created by choosing from a particular icon style like fill color or outline shapes or a mix of both. A unique character can be brought in through adding your brand colors to the icons, transforming the standard icons into a particular consistent shape, have a line frame outline, set against a specific-colored background or another unexplored creative solution.

Size of the icons also matters a lot. Icons are meant to be used in the least size proportionally in any brand asset not because they’re least significant but because their minimal size creates a huge visual impact.

Make sure all your icons are of the same size, orientation and alignment in any composition unless there’s a conscious design intent. Lastly, in the beginning of establishing a brand identity, try to assist your icons with short form text for viewers to understand the functions. This is highly recommended if the icons are actionable or are deviating from standard ones.

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Brand Illustrations/Graphics/Tessellations

“Your premium brand had better be delivering something special, or it’s not going to get the business.”

– Warren Buffet,

Berkshire Hathaway CEO

We’ve already talked about brand imagery in the previous chapters where we focused on the style of photographs your brand can use to highlight the brand values. Today we’re living in an era when photographs are not the only means to communicate visually. Art has moved a lot far from poetically exclusive applications in museums and galleries to the commercial and corporate sector. Brands all over the world leverage the emotionally grasping capabilities of graphic art. From line art to 3d characters to complex illustrations every brand is employing these means to communicate their messages, ideas and updates.

But why is it so significant? Well, for one reason, businesses across the world are pushing hard towards communicating their products and services to the layman. This is for an obvious reason to increase sales but also to inform the consumer of its benefits thus establishing a strong relationship and thus a successful brand identity.

Secondly, illustrations are quick to understand, grab our attention in this fast-paced world, and help us retain valuable information for a much longer time than long form text.

Lastly, these graphics can reinforce your brand’s visual presence and will give you an edge over others presenting a similar product or service.

Now that you’ve read about why it is necessary, let’s understand how to begin and what all steps to take? Your brand values will again be the germinating point here and the kind of brand you’re creating.

To begin with, you’ll need to identify the kind of illustrations your brand needs. Does it need complex data visualizations like charts, graphs, etc. to communicate quantifiable numerical data? Does it need simple diagrams to communicate processes, ideas or some product nomenclature? Does it need character sketches or 3d character animation to communicate a simpler but impactful emotion for example a team building quality of a design studio? Does it need abstract patterns, textures or tessellations to be used as a background for packaging, presentations and other documents?

Does your brand have a mascot whose character needs to be graphically exciting to associate with for instance the Amul Girl or the KFC founder’s head?

These were only a few examples of the types of brand illustrations to give you an idea of what exists. But you’re free to explore other options in collaboration with your designers. Once you’ve decided on what needs to be done, you need to create a bundle of such graphics through an iterative process. Don’t fixate on the first idea that you get. Show it to your team members and discuss with them. Align them with the brand values and create (or get designers on board) mockups before finalizing.

Mockups are visuals created by applying an illustration to the final product to understand the feasibility of a design in the real world before final production. Getting good quality mockups is really important because it will not only allow you to visualize the legibility and beforehand but will also save a lot of time, effort and money involved in re-making them after a potential mistake.

Try to get a mockup on a web screen, mobile screen, brochure cover, stationery, packaging, poster or banner, documents, etc. Check for readability, clashes between different elements on the layout, and visibility in different web screen environments.

You need to check if a complex illustration remains equally visible on a mobile screen as it is on a large size print. If after production the text color on top of an illustration’s merges with each other, you’ll have to throw away the several hundred web screen brochures, redesign and re-develop the website and mobile app (the develop might charge you a fortune for this mistake), maybe throw all the brand stationery because the complex illustration that you designed on a 26-inch monitor is nothing but a small black spot on the business card. I hope by now you realize the significance of an iterative process at this stage.

By now we’ve covered all the ingredients required to tangibly create a strong and successful brand identity. You’re probably ready with all your brand colors, typography, name, story, illustrations, imagery and tone of voice. With all the fresh ingredients, just spread out on the kitchen shelf, how do we create the perfect brand cuisine? Surprisingly, we don’t. Just yet.

We get out of the kitchen with all our ingredients and we begin to write down the recipe. We prepare a brand style guide. Why did we stop making the delicious brand dish and head on to writing a detailed recipe? This will be discussed in the next chapter on ‘Brand Style Guide’.

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Brand Style Guide

Now it's time to compile all the brand assets!

“Branding demands commitment; commitment to continual re-invention; striking chords with people to stir their emotions; and commitment to imagination. It is easy to be cynical about such things, much harder to be successful.”

– Sir Richard Branson

Imagine you and your team decided to go with a particular logo design for your brand a couple of months back. Today, your company is invited to exhibit a collection of works at the world's largest design conference. The organizers of the event need your brand logo to be used in various media collaterals such as brochures, banners, promotional videos, etc.

Your brand logo is designed in a specific orientation, size and color. But while sending the organizers your logo file, no one informs them about the ways it should and shouldn't be used. What happens next?

You arrive at the exhibition venue and to your surprise, your brand's logo is all skewed up in a square black box with a noisy background making it ugly and illegible.

You reach out to the organizers and complain that the logo is messed up and no one would be able to read your brand name on this dark background. "What blunder have you done! This is not how it was supposed to be!", you start shouting at the innocent organizers who have no understanding of how a brand logo could cause such havoc. The organizers are not designers. The event designers have a fixed template of collateral design where they insert brand logos of several companies in whatsoever way they receive. They won't tamper around with it unless the company specifies certain guidelines.

"It's not our mistake sir. You sent us the company logo without any brand style guide. You have to specify how others will use your brand assets. How would we know if you never tell us?", says the event manager on your face. Now you'll realize the mistake of not creating a set of guidelines for your brand logo, color, typography, etc. Immediately you'll call up your marketing agency, your designers, and team members to stop using them as they wish. Now you'll create a brand style guide.

What's a brand style guide? You may wonder before you start. It's a concise document with a detailed set of guidelines, instructions, dos and don'ts, mock-ups, alternatives, and best practices for use of your brand assets on the various brand touch points. It's a holy guidebook or everyone who'll be involved in the branding activities of your business, directly or indirectly.

There's no exhaustive or strict list of contents for this guide. It'll majorly cover your brand name, story, logo, colors, typography, illustrations, tone of voice, iconography, and imagery with how and where to use them.

It can be as detailed as defining the exact words to be used in an email communication or a hundred color combinations of the logo's foreground and background that won't work. Or it can be brief and concise with basic guidelines depending upon the extent and frequency at which your brand assets are used by others.

For instance, if your brand is a media company with an international online and offline reach, then you need to specify exhaustive guidelines because chances of misalignment with the brand identity are higher. However, if your brand is a small Architecture Consultancy with localized reach and limited branding activities, then you can get away with a concise style guide.

A Brand Style Guide is nothing more than a recipe book for your cooking classes. It contains all the ingredients, how much to use, where to add, when to mix, how not to bake and a lot more. We'll pick up each ingredient of your brand and understand what needs to be done with it in the style guide.

a) Brand name: 

1. Define the meaning of your brand name.
2. Break it down if it's a monogram or an abbreviation.
3. Narrate the story behind the particular name.
4. What does it stand for? Are there any inspirations behind it?
5. Identify the correct and incorrect usages.
6. Spell it out. Write down the correct pronunciation so that people don't spell it otherwise.
7. Identify any misconceptions, misunderstandings or legal usages.
8. Identify various channels or media where it'll be displayed.
9. Identify any alternatives or short forms.

B) Brand Story:

1. Narrate the brand story in a few words.
2. Identify various platforms where it'll be narrated or presented.
3. Create a visual translation of the story in the form of a mood board, a single photograph, illustration, video, etc.
4. Identify the do's and don'ts.
5. Identify any long form or short form alternatives.
6. Are there any characters associated with the story? Highlight them.
7. Identify and strike off any old story, misinterpretation, etc.

C) Brand Colors

1. Create a color palette.
2. Define and narrate the reason, story, any psychological association.
3. Identify and demonstrate the primary, secondary and tertiary colors.
4. Write down the specific RGB, CMYK, HTML color codes of each of them to be used by designers.
5. Get a pantone or spot color to be used by offset print documents.
6. Create a set of tints and shades palette of the primary or secondary color to be used to create harmony and consistency in designs.
7. Visually demonstrate the percentage of colors to be used in different collaterals.
8. Identify dos and don'ts of color usages such as in background and foreground or avoiding too much of one color.
9. Create an alternative monochrome palette to be used on black and white collaterals.
10. If required, create an alternative palette for separate communications or internal divisions of a brand for instance different academic departments of a university can use different colors.
11. Demonstrate a few mock-ups to show application in different media.

D) Brand Logo

1. Display the latest logo with overall proportions, sizes, margins, white space or any other dimensions or hidden grid lines to show its correct construct.
2. Demonstrate the hidden meaning or story behind the logo, the choice of its colors, any association with any object or symbol.
3. Describe the evolution of the brand logo if any older versions exist.
4. Identify the dos and don'ts of its usages on different backgrounds, any tampering, old versions, minimum legible sizes, etc.
5. Create different versions of the logo to be used on different media platforms for instance with or without a tagline, transparent or white background, black and white alternatives, square, portrait and landscape versions, etc.
6. Identify and mention the correct color codes of the different parts of the logo.
7. Create a few mockups to show logo placement best practices on different online and offline media.

E) Brand Typography

1. Identify the primary and secondary typefaces.
2. Define the particular fonts to be used from the typeface. For instance, Poppins Bold to be used for headings and Poppins light for subheadings.
3. Create a visual Hierarchy system by defining the sizes and proportions of font sizes to be used on different media.
4. Identify the dos and don'ts of font usage specifying where not to use a primary display font for readability reasons.
5. Mention the reasons behind typeface choice and narrate the story if the font is customized specifically for your brand.
6. Mention the style and variations of all characters including numbers and symbols.
7. Create a few mockups of collaterals and documents to show correct usage of different cases (like uppercase, lowercase, sentence case) and hierarchy of headings.
8. Mention the correct letter spacing (tracking), kerning (individual character spacing) if required and leading (space between the lines of sentences in a paragraph) to an extent that doesn't hamper the readability of the message.
9. Identify the individual software programs which will deploy typography and mention specific guidelines for each individually. Create an alternative font (one which is universally available everywhere) if a particular software doesn't support your brand typeface. Also advanced modifications such as tracking and kerning are only present in professional design software. So, specify some guidelines for everyday use programs such as Office, Gmail, etc.

F) Brand's tone of voice

1. Define the overall quality of communication based on brand values.
2. Mention the reasons behind this choice.
3. Identify the language(s) of communication with different target audiences. Mention if your brand's going to stick with English US or UK or any other as default.
4. Define certain ways of greeting or ending a conversation, expressing gratitude or concern, demonstrating noncompliance, and expressing a particular brand value.
5. Set standards for everyday internal and external communications within the team and outside with clients over mail or in person.
6. Define and demonstrate typical social media communications, user engagement messages, copywriting in posts, replying to potential clients, etc.
7. Identify do's and don'ts for unacceptable communication standards that harm the relationship of company with the team and public.

G) Brand Imagery

1. Set photography standards to be followed by professional photographers who'll use it when clicking and delivering pictures for your brand collaterals to ensure a consistent brand identity across the visual media.
2. Define appropriate sizes, orientation, proportion system (like rule of thirds) if required, focus subject, kind of lighting, overall color tone and mood, color manipulations of black and white, duotone, sepia or others to ensure a unique coherent style if conveyed.
3. Identify do's and don'ts for incorrect cropping on different media, inappropriate color overlay, overlay of text on a noisy photograph, etc.
4. Mention the different types of images to be used for different purposes for instance final building photographs to show the projects of an architecture company, black and white photographs of construction work and light gray tone photos of team members of the same.
5. Always demonstrate the imagery guidelines with sample images and their mockups on different media.
6. Mention the quality of photographs, photographers to be contacted, and an online repository of paid or free high quality stock images to be used.

H) Brand Iconography

1. Identify and create a set of similar style icons.
2. Describe the reason behind the choice of a particular style. It should be aligned with other visual assets.
3. Provide correct sizing of icons on different media like websites, brochures, etc., or better create a proportion system to be used beside text.
4. Determine if the icons are supposed to have a set of colors to differentiate them from the others. Mention their color codes and amount to be used in the guide.
5. Identify the do's and don'ts of using icons such as incorrect styles, skewed or tampered, overcomplicated icons, color combinations that don't make any sense, oversized icons in comparison to text, incorrect placement, etc.
6. Demonstrate the guidelines through a couple of webs, mobile or print mockups.

I) Brand Illustrations/Graphics

1. Create a set of illustrations to be used on different media for specific purposes. Mention the reason or story behind them.
2. Create alternatives with different color variations to be suited to a varied media with different backgrounds and foregrounds.
3. Mention the minimum and maximum proportion and size for the illustration to be legible.
4. Get appropriate legal rights to use the illustrations and offer credits to the original graphic artist wherever possible.
5. Mention appropriate guidelines for the use of tessellations to be used on covers of your documents or elsewhere as their excess or bold use can be overpowering and may distract the viewer from the main message.
6. Create a few mock-ups to demonstrate how a particular illustration will look on the collateral.

Compiling the Brand style guide

Above we have covered the basic guidelines for each of your brand assets. It's not a strict to follow list and your brand is free to deviate or add on to the instructions. The lists given here are prepared after several branding sessions, learning from failures and through years of research. After getting all the guidelines finalized amongst your team, it's now the time to compile them in a guidebook. Remember not to treat this style guide as a onetime build, deliver and forget project but as a document that needs to be referred and updated from time to time.

You may compile the above guidelines in a basic presentation format or pick up a template or design it on a high-end design software like Adobe InDesign. It's your choice. But remember to add visual examples and crisp bulleted lists for the reader to grasp the instruction clearly. Make sure you leave no room for misunderstanding or overlap of information. In the end, get it printed, put it up in your office, on your brand website and never worry about another event organizer messing up with your brand's logo.

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Sample Brand Style Guide

“Your culture is your brand.”

– Tony Hsieh