Design
Brand guidelines
Brand guidelines are the document that records how a brand identity is used: logo variants and clear space, colour values and their roles, the type scale, imagery direction and the things not to do. Also called a brand book or style guide.
The useful test of a set of guidelines is whether the person making the next slide can follow them without asking anyone. That person is usually not a designer, is in a hurry, and needs to know which logo file to use, what the heading colour is and how much space to leave. Guidelines written to impress other designers fail this test in the first week.
A workable document is short and specific: each rule states what to do, and the important ones say why, because a rule with a reason survives a deadline and a rule without one does not. Screenshots of correct and incorrect use do more work than paragraphs of principle.
Guidelines are written last, from what proved to work in real applications, not first as a specification. A brand book produced before the identity has been applied to anything is a set of predictions, and the corrections arrive later as exceptions nobody records.
Brand identity and websiteDesign