A brand book refers to the guidelines of the brand’s identity summed up in a book. The book mentions the company’s specific logos, colours, taglines and more. Usually, companies limit themselves to jotting down only design based guidelines, but some companies go to the extent of including communication-based directives too. So what is needed in a good brand book creation? Let us take a look at some tips to help you out on the path of the best brand creation.

1) Catch Attention with Quirkiness

While your brand book creation is taking place, keep in mind that being simple is not going to reflect your brand’s true identity. Brainstorm a lot more than it is needed to come up with a great idea of how you want to layout your brand into a book. You have to be able to ideate it inside your mind already because it is your brand and you know it better than any layman does. Do not have a tedious, monotonous theme going on; otherwise, your employees will not feel connected to your brand. One of the best brand book creations is considered to be the Quietroom’s Santa Brand Book. The agency has created a brand image of Santa Claus engagingly and humorously, and a book you should take inspiration from for ideation.

2) Fonts Speak Louder Than Words

In the typography section, you mention your brand’s consistent fonts, and it’s specifications. Try not to mention your typography-based guidelines plainly, go for an extraordinary approach. The way you position font on marketing messages, the same way you have to use the fonts to represent your brand’s personality. You should be able to show the reason you have selected such a font for your brand. A great example is the brand book creation of Macaroni Grill. The typography section shares Macaroni Grill’s owned font and with all the characters.

3) Easy-to-Grasp Content

This brand book creation is taking place in the first place for your employees to get to know your brand image well. That means they have to be able to read and understand it easily. Thus, try to include as much detail as possible that your brand image needs. Ontraport.com has a brand book that mentions everything in simple words and yet has a good design. They have portrayed most of the information like social media, imagery, and campaigns in an illustrated manner which perfectly captures the essence of the online automation company.

4) Minimalism is the New Extra

A part of you may want to blow up your brand book creation with colours and designs but refrain from doing anything too over the top. Yes, you have to be unique, but it does not mean you must use ten different colours in the book. Instead, select your brand colours and use them consistently in your brand book creation; that way, the book looks classy as well as shows your brand image. Uber, a famous household brand, has used a minimalist theme throughout their brand book, and it turned out to look incredible. It has incorporated brand colours and allows viewers to see only what they need rather than turning pages around to find.

5) Modulate the Voice and Tone

Based on your target audience, you can determine the right voice and tone to use. It shows how you want to speak and convey to your audience. Ask yourself questions before moving further with this. Are there words you should avoid? Is it okay to make jokes, or should you refrain from doing that? What type of tone your brand will speak in – logical, emotional, distant, formal, etc.? Besides the sound, select a format, maybe American Psychological Association (AMA), Modern Language Association (MLA) or you could readily come up with your own. For grammatical details, specify acronyms, abbreviations, numbers, characters, capitalizations, and titles that you will use for your brand consistently. Creating the voice and tone for the brand book is a step that you should stress on the most because this is how you will communicate with your target audience and your employees should be aware of every little detail.

Skype has a great tone of voice guidelines in their brand book. Although throughout the brand book, they have consistently maintained the tone of voice, on the page of the voice guidelines, they have written a summarized paragraph of their brand personality in a witty manner.

6) Play with Grids

Grid-based guidelines are usually used to show the logo in your brand book. These look good, and a lot of brand book are going with this method even for other factors besides the logo. You may already have created a great logo, but using grid lines for your logo in your brand book will show the readers the exact way the logo is supposed to be. TBS has designed their first three pages with only one logo in the centre and versatile colours on each. On the third page with black background and grid lines, they have plotted the logo. Another good example is District Circle, where they have used grids for other pages to show how the formatting of the content should look. The interesting twist is that they have incorporated the Golden Ratio grid into their brand book creation, which outlines the entire design for the pages.

A brand book creation is not how precisely you accomplish every step, but how creatively you use your ideas. Take inspiration from all these examples and go ahead with your brand book creation. A good brand book will help your employees connect better to your brand and improve productivity. You can always hire a printing company to help you out with creating a good design for your brand book creation.