What is brand guidelines?
Also called brand style guide, brand book, style guide.
Brand guidelines are a document that sets out how a business looks and sounds: how to use the logo, which colours and fonts to use, the style of images, the tone of voice, and words or topics to avoid.
Why it matters
As soon as more than one person, freelancer or tool creates posts for you, things start to drift. Brand guidelines keep everything recognisably yours, make it faster to brief anyone new, and settle small arguments, such as which shade of green or whether you use emoji, before they happen.
Example
A café's one-page guide says: logo on cream or dark green only; colours cream, forest green and terracotta; one rounded font for headings; photos in natural light with real customers and real food; tone warm and chatty; never use "cheap", always "good value"; one or two emoji at most.
What to include in brand guidelines
Small businesses don't need a forty-page book. Cover these:
- Logo: the versions you have, minimum size, and backgrounds it can sit on.
- Colours: your main and accent colours with their codes (hex for screens).
- Fonts: one for headings and one for body text, with free alternatives if needed.
- Image style: lighting, subjects, filters and what to avoid.
- Tone of voice: three to five words that describe how you sound, with a do and don't example for each.
- Words: preferred terms, banned words, and how you write your business name.
- Social media rules: emoji, hashtags, calls to action, and how you reply to comments.
- Topics to avoid, such as politics or competitors.
How to make a one-page version in an afternoon
Start from what already works rather than inventing a new identity.
- Gather your logo files and your five best-looking posts, flyers or web pages.
- Pick out the colours that appear most and record their codes.
- Note the fonts you use, and choose one for headings and one for text.
- Describe your best posts' photos in a sentence: what they show and how they are lit.
- Read a few of your best captions aloud and choose words for how they sound.
- List the words and topics you never want to see in your posts.
- Put it all on one page and share it with everyone who posts for you.
Brand guidelines vs brand voice vs social media policy
Brand voice is one part of your guidelines: how you sound in writing. Brand guidelines cover voice plus everything visual. A social media policy is different again: it sets rules for staff behaviour on social media, such as who can post and how to protect customer privacy. Many small businesses keep all three short and in the same folder.
In Zolyp, these rules live in Brand Brain, which holds your tone of voice, colours, logo, services, audience and banned topics, and every post is written and designed against it.
Common mistakes
Guidelines only help if people use them.
- Making them so long that nobody reads them.
- Describing the voice with vague words like "professional" without examples.
- Forgetting to update them after a rebrand or new product.
- Keeping them on one person's laptop instead of sharing them.
Common questions
What is the difference between brand guidelines and a brand style guide?
Usually nothing: they are two names for the same document. Some companies use "style guide" only for the visual rules and keep voice in a separate guide.
Do small businesses need brand guidelines?
Yes, once anyone other than you creates content, including freelancers, staff or AI tools. A single page is enough to keep posts consistent.
How do I give my brand guidelines to a freelancer or an AI tool?
Share the document with your logo files and a few examples of posts you like and don't like. Examples do more than descriptions. With AI tools, save the rules where the tool can use them every time, rather than pasting them into each request.