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How to Design a Brand Guidelines Manual: A Step-by-Step Guide | Learn What I Know

Header image for brand guidelines manual project for kbs project | Learn what I Know
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Introduction


W(caps)hen working with brands, creating a clear and effective Brand Guidelines manual is essential for maintaining consistency across all platforms. Recently, I designed a comprehensive manual for kitchen and bath specialists, tailored to reflect their luxurious yet approachable brand identity. In this tutorial, I’ll walk you through the steps I took to create this manual and share some screenshots from my Figma workboard to illustrate the process.


Step 1: Define the Brand’s Core Elements

Before diving into the design, it’s crucial to define the brand’s identity. For the kitchen and bath specialists, we focused on:

  • Logo Usage: Establishing guidelines for logo placement, minimum sizes, and color variations.
  • Color Palette: Selecting a clean, professional set of colors that evoke trust and premium service.
  • Typography: Choosing fonts that align with the brand’s voice, ensuring readability and style.

Since they already had a website established the job was pretty simple just to extract the colors, typography and other information from there. To do this we scanned their website & picked colors and fonts and other information about the brand. ( You can use font finder and color picker to do that.)

Browser screenshot for kbs project | Learn what I Know

Screenshot of the font selection process from KB Specialists.


The next step involved to Make some good design decision e.g: Limiting the number of fonts to be used or spacing between the logo and other art work. As you can see in the screenshot below the site is using around 5-6 font. Which is not a good idea for a brand from focusing on user experience and readability. Its always a good idea to limit your to a maximum of 2 fonts and should never consider going above 3.

Figma workboard board screenshot for kbs project | Learn what I Know

Screenshot of the fonts from KB Specialists.


Step 2: Structuring the Manual

Next, once I got the information I looked for inspirations for brand guidelines manual on Behance and planned a structure. I structured the manual in Figma to ensure that all essential brand elements were easy to navigate. I divided the document into the following sections:

  • Logo Guidelines: How to use the logo, Adjusting its spacing and and preparing multiple color variations for different use cases. Designing patterns to enforce brand identity and watermark both for print and digital media.
  • Colors: The official color palette and tones of primary colors.
  • Typography: Guidelines on fonts for headings, body text, and any specific use cases.
  • Mockups: Pre-designed materials like letterheads and business cards to showcase the example about how the brand identity will look a like in real world.

Figma workboard board screenshot for kbs project | Learn what I Know
Figma Workboard

Step 3: Finalizing, Exporting & Designing Ready-to-Use Template

After designing all the elements, I refined the details to ensure clarity and usability. The 19-slide manual is easy for anyone on the client’s team to understand and implement, no matter their design experience.


Figma workboard board screenshot for kbs project | Learn what I Know
Full Project screenshot in Figma

However one thing I always like to do is create the reuse able work in whatever I do so I designed the manual in a way that not only client but anyone can use the template and stream line designing process in no time. The Template is available on figma community for free to use.

Please feel free to download through this link: (getButton) #text=(Get the template ) (alert-passed)

Key Takeaways:

  • Consistency is key:

    Every element, from colors to typography, should work together to reinforce the brand's identity.

  • Make it user-friendly: The manual should be clear and easy to navigate for the client’s team, especially those with no design background.
  • Streamline the process: Ready-to-use templates save time and ensure consistency across all marketing materials.

Check Out the Full Manual on Behance!

If you want to dive deeper into the final Brand Guidelines manual, feel free to explore the full project on Bechance: (getButton) #text=(See on Behance) (alert-passed)


Thank you for reading this post. I hope you like the work.  Please feel free to leave comments, share the post, and check out my other work.


Cheers,
Gyan

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