Branding guidelines

Dave1975

Active Member
Hi guys,

My experiences of branding guidelines in my previous job was always something that was very strict and formal, and once set they could never be broken unless it was an extreme case. But recently I've been thinking will branding guidelines will start to become more relaxed in terms of the formality they have, as we see more and more brands develop their branding with more creativity and freedom will branding guidelines become less strict and formal?

As a freelancer with smaller clients I have less involvement with brand guidelines, as they tend to be commissioned and used by larger companies, but interested to know everyone's experiences with them. Greg
 
We get given brand guidelines on 75% of our jobs, it's nice to have something clear and concise to work to, but we even stretch outside these sometimes and add a bit of creativity.

Clients tend to like this though and enjoy the freedom of expressing their brand differently.

There are those, of course, that will hunt down you and your family if you're a pixel off...
 
I've put together brand guidelines in the past and try to make to make them as concise and accurate as possible but I don't think that they're always needed.

I've seen some really terrible ones in the past though, litrally a PDF with images of the logo and thats it.
 
We have recently completed the design of an intranet & employee pack for a wind turbine company, we were given a 48 page brand guidelines booklet to work to, good thing though was it made our job very easy which is the irony of it all.

Brett
 
We can work to brand guidelines and create them. Long and tiresome though.

Most older BGs is out dated purely due to the way it is written. The modern era will allow creativity to shine whilst the brand is maintained. Look at the way Orange markets themselves. They change their designers frequently (often freelancers) to keep their marketing fresh and branding maintained.

We've written this on our website : (please remove if this is not allowed...)

Brand guidelines

We believe that brand guidelines are essential to the successful nurturing and protection of a company's corporate identity. The investment made to a brand design could be entirely wasted if the identity is used inconsistently, unprofessionally or out of context.

Developing a brand guideline will ensure that your company is represented in the correct way. The larger the marketing output is, the more important it is to develop a brand guideline.

Working closely with our clients, we are able to develop a set of corporate guidelines that go beyond a set of rules but will inspire your designers to create professional, captivating work every single time they use the corporate identity.
The last paragraph explains what I said above.
 
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