Brand Guidelines Checklist: What to Include in Your Brand Book

The brand guidelines checklist at a glance

Use this to brief a designer or check the guidelines you already have. Each row is something a new hire, freelancer or agency needs to get right without asking you.

Foundations and voice

Start with words, because every design decision after this has to support them.

• Positioning before the logo. One line on what you do, for whom, and why you're different.
• One approved company description, in two lengths. A one-liner and a version of about 50 words, used word for word on your website, LinkedIn, decks and directories. Buyers, investors and AI assistants then see the same words everywhere.
• Naming rules. How the company and each product are written. One seed-stage healthtech startup's guidelines say product names are always capitalized as names.
• Approved terminology. Words to use and words to retire. For that same client, we replaced one product word across the whole website so sales and the site say the same thing.
• Voice traits with examples. Three traits, each with a "write this, not this" line.

Logo, color, type and imagery: the rules people break

Logo

• Clear space measured from part of the mark, so it scales with the logo.
• Minimum sizes for screen and print.
• Which logo color goes on which background. The healthtech startup's rules: white logo on navy or blue, orange logo on white, and the black logo only for specific uses such as trade media and events.
• A square icon for favicons and social avatars. Google asks for a square favicon of at least 8x8px, recommends larger than 48x48px, and wants it to represent your brand (Google Search Central).
• Misuse examples: stretched, recolored, or placed on a busy photo.

Color

• HEX and RGB for screens, CMYK for print, and Pantone if you print in spot colors.
• Approved text and background pairs, with their contrast ratios. WCAG 2.2 AA asks for 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text, meaning 18pt, or 14pt bold (W3C). Buttons and other interface parts need 3:1 against the colors next to them (W3C).
• Logos are exempt. Text in your brand colors isn't, even when the brand book specifies it. A bright brand color can fail behind white button text, so name an accessible shade for buttons.

Type

• A font license that covers your website, apps and desktop use, including decks and documents.
• A fallback font for PowerPoint and Google Slides, for anyone who doesn't have the brand font installed.
• A type scale in rem for the website and in pt for slides.
• Fixed weights and spacing. The healthtech startup's body text is one light-weight sans serif with fixed letter spacing, matched across the website and collateral, so a brochure and a web page read the same.

Imagery

• Photo, illustration and icon style, with a right and a wrong example of each.
• Which brand motifs are current. The healthtech startup moved away from one motif and later back to an earlier one, then used both evenly in videos. Write the current rule down, because motifs drift.
• Screenshot rules. Theirs: never show real patient names or IDs in product screenshots. Any product with customer data needs a version of this rule.

Applications and files your team will use

A brand book that lives only in a PDF gets ignored. Put the rules where people make things.

• Website. Set colors, sizes and fonts as variables in your Webflow website. Webflow has color, size, percentage, number and font variables, and a changed value updates everywhere it's used (Webflow). Add button, link, form and heading styles.
• Decks. A PowerPoint or Google Slides master with layouts for title, section, chart, team and quote slides, plus chart colors. A good deck template lets your team build decks without a designer.
• Social and email. Profile and cover images, a link-preview image template, an email signature, and email header and footer templates.
• Files. Logo SVG for the web, PNG for slides and documents, vector PDF or AI for print, plus fonts or license links and templates, in one shared folder you own. Our handover lists every final asset, editable source file and any fonts, stock or software licenses.

Here's how that played out for the healthtech startup. Its marketing lead had already run a brand workshop with leadership, so we built from its output, showed 2 to 3 creative directions within days, and wrote the full guidelines from the one they chose. The logo stayed: it was a refresh, not a rebrand.

Those rules then went into the Webflow website, LinkedIn templates and conference banners, email header and footer templates, and a PowerPoint system with reusable layouts. Their marketing lead can now build sales, marketing, product, partnership, event and company decks themselves.

How much brand book you need at your stage

• Pre-seed and seed. A short guide covering the "day one" rows above. Our Raise kit builds brand foundations (logo, colors, type and a short guide) alongside your website and deck, from $12,000 in 3 to 4 weeks.
• Seed to Series A. Full guidelines, adding imagery, motion, sales and hiring templates, and co-branding. Our Launch package includes full brand identity and guidelines, from $20,000 in 4 to 8 weeks. A standalone brand identity with logo, palette, type and guidelines starts at $3,700.
• Later stage and enterprise. Add approval steps, rules for regions or sub-brands, and a central asset library.

Keep it current

• Name one owner: the founder or first marketing hire, later the head of marketing.
• Put a version number and date on the cover.
• Share one link instead of attachments, so nobody works from an old PDF.
• Keep a change log, and review the book after a raise, a launch, a new market or a rebrand.

Then check your real website, decks and social posts against it with a brand audit.

Send your logo files, website link and latest deck through our contact page, and we'll tell you what your guidelines are missing. Our brand identity design page shows how we build them.