BRAND GUIDELINES DOCUMENT
The document that keeps the brand consistent after I leave.
Most brand books are built to be admired. Ninety slides, a page of mood imagery, four adjectives, and a logo exclusion zone measured to the millimetre. Then a new hire writes an Instagram caption and nothing in that document helps them do it. A guideline that cannot settle an argument on a Tuesday afternoon is decoration, not infrastructure.
The version I write is a working document. Positioning on one page. Voice as pairs of example sentences — the on-brand line next to the near-miss, with the reason stated. Naming conventions for products, files and campaigns. Logo, colour and type specs with the real values in them. And a decision-rules section for the situations the document never predicted.
Documentation and handover are part of every engagement here, which is rarer than it should be. Most of what this industry delivers assumes the person who made it stays reachable. I write so your designer, your editor, a freelancer you hire next year and an AI tool you brief can all produce something recognisably yours without needing to ask me first.
WHAT I DO
- Positioning one-pager — who the brand is for, what it claims, and what it refuses to be.
- Voice guide as example pairs — the on-brand line beside the version that misses, and the reason why.
- Vocabulary list — words the brand uses, words it never uses, and the spellings that are now fixed.
- Naming conventions for products, campaigns, files and channels, so the archive stays searchable in two years.
- Visual specs — logo use and misuse, colour values, type scale, spacing, image treatment, with actual numbers.
- Decision rules — how to judge a situation the document does not cover, instead of guessing or escalating.
- Brief templates, so anyone commissioning work states the brand correctly by default.
HOW I WORK
- 01
GATHER
Collect everything already in use, including the undocumented habits that have quietly become the brand.
- 02
DECIDE
Settle the open questions — the two logo versions, the three spellings of the name, the tone nobody ever agreed on.
- 03
WRITE
Draft the document in plain language, with real examples in place of adjectives.
- 04
TEST
Hand it to somebody uninvolved, have them make something with it, and fix whatever they had to ask about.
BEST FOR
- Brands where three people produce content and it looks like three different brands.
- Companies bringing in freelancers or editors and re-explaining the brand from scratch every time.
- A business that just finished identity work and has nothing written down to protect it.
- Anyone briefing AI tools, which need written rules far more literally than a person does.
NOT THIS
- Not identity design. Creating the logo, palette and type system is Creative Direction & Visual Identity Direction — this documents those decisions.
- Not a template pack. Social templates, decks and asset files are design production, not documentation.
- Not brand strategy itself. If positioning and messaging do not exist yet, those pages come first — guidelines record decisions, they do not make them.
THE PROOF
Published case studies from brand solutions work. Each one names the client and shows what was delivered.
STRAIGHT ANSWERS
REST OF BRAND SOLUTIONS
MAKE A
WISH.
Tell me what you're building. I'll tell you how loud it can get.
- /01
YOU WRITE
Tell me what you're building and what's in the way. Two lines is enough.
- /02
WE TALK
A 30-minute call, booked within 7 days. Real questions, no pitch theatre.
- /03
YOU GET A PLAN
Scope, timeline and an honest number, usually within a week.