By Mehdi HassanMost brand guidelines fail for a boring reason: nobody opens them. They're long PDFs written for an imagined future team, full of rules about stationery and billboard margins, and silent on the things your team does every week, like building a landing page section or a sales deck. This guide gives you a lean template that covers what people actually need, and nothing they don't.
What are brand guidelines?
Brand guidelines are a document or site that sets the rules for using your brand's visual and verbal identity: how the logo is placed, which colors and fonts to use, how you sound, and what finished work looks like. Their job is to let someone who wasn't in the room when the brand was made produce work that still looks and sounds like you.
You'll also hear them called a brand book, a brand style guide or a brand manual. The names overlap, and teams use them loosely. If you want the precise differences, and which one a startup should make first, read our breakdown of brand book vs style guide vs brand guidelines. For this template we treat brand guidelines as the practical rulebook: shorter than a brand book, broader than a visual style guide.
Guidelines come after the brand itself. They document decisions about positioning, identity and voice; they don't make them. If you haven't settled who you're for and why you're different, start with brand positioning and come back. A beautifully formatted guide around an unclear position just spreads the confusion faster.
What should brand guidelines include?
Brand guidelines should include five core sections: logo, color, typography, voice and applications. Everything else, from illustration style to photography direction, is an add-on you write once the brand actually uses it. The table below shows what each core section covers and the gap that shows up most often in startup guides.
Section | What it covers | Common gap |
|---|---|---|
Logo | Versions, clear space, minimum size, backgrounds, misuse | No guidance for small sizes such as favicons and app icons |
Color | Primary and secondary palette, HEX/RGB/CMYK, usage ratios | No rules for text contrast or dark mode |
Typography | Typefaces, weights, type scale, fallbacks | No web font fallback or licensing note |
Voice | Personality, tone by context, words to use and avoid | Adjectives with no before/after examples |
Applications | Website sections, deck, social, email, product UI | Missing entirely; this is what people copy |
Assets and owner | Where files live, who approves exceptions | Dead links and no named owner |
The sixth row is not a section in most templates, and it should be. A guide with a broken download link and no owner is effectively retired. Put the asset link and the owner's name on the first page.
The free brand guidelines template, page by page
This brand guidelines template runs to about 10 pages, one idea per page. Copy the structure into Figma, Notion, Google Slides or a web page. The prompts under each page are the questions the page has to answer; if you can't answer one yet, leave the page out rather than padding it.
- Cover and contents: brand name, version number, date, owner and a link to the asset folder.
- Brand in one page: who you're for, what you do, why you're different, in three sentences. Link the full positioning doc.
- Logo: primary, horizontal and symbol versions; clear space; minimum sizes for print and screen.
- Logo misuse: four to six wrong examples (stretched, recolored, on busy photos) with a red cross on each.
- Color: palette with HEX, RGB and CMYK values, a usage ratio, and approved text-on-background pairs.
- Typography: typefaces, a type scale from display to caption, and the fallback for web and slides.
- Voice: three personality traits, each with a do/don't sentence pair, plus a short word list.
- Imagery: illustration and photo direction, if you use either. Skip this page if you don't yet.
- Applications: the website hero, a deck slide, a social post and an email header, shown finished.
- Files and requests: where the source files live, how to request new assets, and who signs off.
Fill-in prompts for the voice page
Write three traits as 'We are X, not Y': for example, 'direct, not blunt'. Under each, write one sentence the way you'd say it and one sentence you'd never publish, on the same topic.
Then add a short list of words you use (your product terms, spelled the way you spell them) and words you avoid (jargon your buyers don't use, competitor terms). Finish with tone shifts: how the voice changes in an error message, a sales email and a launch post. Keep each to one line with an example.
Ten pages is a starting point, not a cap. Our longer argument for keeping it short lives in brand guidelines for startups: the 10-page version.
How do you write the logo and color sections?
Write the logo and color sections as measurable rules with an example next to each one. 'Give the logo room to breathe' is a wish; 'keep clear space equal to the height of the symbol on all sides' is a rule someone can check. The same goes for color: 'use blue sparingly' means nothing, while 'blue covers roughly a tenth of any layout, mostly buttons and links' gives a designer something to aim at.
For the logo page, show every version you supply and say where each one goes: the full lockup for the website header, the symbol for favicons, avatars and app icons, a one-color version for embroidery or etching. Then set a minimum size for screen and print, because that's where most logos break.
For color, give exact values in every format your team will meet: HEX for web, RGB for screens and slides, CMYK or a Pantone match for print if you print. Then list the text and background pairs that pass contrast, so nobody has to test them again. The W3C's WCAG guidance sets the contrast thresholds most teams design to.
How do you write the typography and voice sections?
Typography and voice are the sections people skip, and they're the two that make a brand recognizable without a logo. Type does it visually and voice does it in words. Both need a system, not just a font name or a list of adjectives.
For typography, name the typefaces and the weights you actually use, then set a type scale: display, H1 to H3, body, small and caption, with sizes and line heights for web. Add the fallback font for slides and email, where custom fonts often don't load, and note who holds the license. A guide that says 'use our brand font' to someone without the license file just creates a support ticket.
For voice, avoid the adjective trap. Every startup is 'friendly, smart and bold'. What distinguishes you is the pairs: the sentence you'd write and the near-miss you wouldn't. Show tone shifting by context, because a pricing page, a 404 page and a fundraising announcement shouldn't sound identical. Because Designify is led by a copywriter-designer, this is where we usually start: if the words are clear, the visual choices get easier.
What belongs in the applications section?
The applications section shows the brand used on real things, and it's the page people copy most. Show finished examples of the surfaces your team produces every week: website sections, a deck title and content slide, social post templates, an email header and, if you have a product, a screen or two.
Applications do something rules can't: they show how the rules combine. A designer can follow your color and type pages perfectly and still produce something that doesn't feel like you, because the spacing, image crops and hierarchy are wrong. One good example of a feature section settles all of that at once.
If your brand uses illustration or photography, give each its own page with direction and examples. We've written separate guides on creating a brand illustration style that isn't generic and on brand photography guidelines for tech startups. For the website specifically, include a link to the live site and the source file, so the guide and the site don't drift apart.
- core sections: logo, color, type, voice, applications
- 5
- pages in a lean startup guide
- ~10
- rollout budget ManyPixels suggests adding on top of identity design
- 20–40%
Should you build brand guidelines in Figma, a doc or a web page?
Build the source in Figma and publish a readable version where non-designers already look. Designers need live components, color styles and text styles they can pull into their files. Everyone else, from sales to the founder writing a launch post, needs a page that opens in a browser. One format rarely serves both.
Format | Best for | Weak spot |
|---|---|---|
Figma file and library | Designers; the working source of every asset | Non-designers struggle to find things |
PDF or slides | Sending to an agency, printer or investor | Goes stale the day it's exported |
Notion or Google Doc | Voice, word lists, internal how-tos | Weak for visual rules and downloads |
Web page (/brand) | Whole team, partners and press | Needs a site that's easy to update |
Our step-by-step guide to creating brand guidelines in Figma shows how to use variables and libraries so the guide is also the working file. If you want it public, our guide to online brand guidelines covers hosting a /brand page on Framer, Webflow or Next.js, and if you're still choosing a site builder, Framer vs Squarespace compares two common picks for brand sites.
How long should brand guidelines be?
A startup's brand guidelines should be as short as the team can follow: usually around 10 pages. Length grows with the number of people and surfaces that use the brand, not with ambition. A five-person seed team shipping a website, a deck and a product needs logo, color, type, voice and a handful of applications. A 200-person company with partners, events and regional offices needs more.
The test is usage. Ask the last three people who made something branded whether they opened the guide. If not, ask what they needed and couldn't find. Add that page. Delete pages that answer questions nobody asks.
If you want to see what different lengths look like in practice, our collection of brand guidelines examples from tech companies picks one section worth copying from each, from logo rules to voice guides. Notice that the most useful ones are rarely the longest; they're the ones with the clearest examples.
For example, suppose a seed-stage team of eight
For example, suppose an eight-person B2B startup with a website, a pitch deck, a product and a LinkedIn page. Its guide needs the ten pages in the template above, with imagery limited to one page because it only uses product screenshots.
It doesn't need print specifications, signage, merchandise or a 30-page voice manual. When it hires its first marketer, it adds a page of social templates. When it starts sponsoring events, it adds booth and banner specs. Each page arrives when someone needs it.
How do you keep brand guidelines in use after launch?
Guidelines stay in use when they're built into the tools people already work in and someone owns them. A PDF in a shared drive is a reference; templates in your deck tool, components in your Figma library and a /brand page linked from your team wiki are habits.
Three things keep a guide alive. First, templates: a deck master, social templates and document templates do more for consistency than any rule. Second, an owner: one person who answers questions and approves exceptions. Third, a review: once a month, look at what went out and fix the guide where people kept getting it wrong. Our guide to rolling out brand guidelines covers this in detail.
Guidelines also have limits. Several design-system sources, including UXPin and Blend Interactive, point out that brand guides don't settle how product UI behaves: states, spacing tokens and interaction patterns. That's a design system's job, and we explain where one ends and the other starts in brand guidelines vs design system.
What should you read next on brand guidelines?
Pick the next guide by the job in front of you. Here's the full brand guidelines library, grouped by what you're trying to do.
- Deciding what to make: brand book vs style guide vs brand guidelines and brand guidelines for startups.
- Looking for inspiration: 20 brand guidelines examples from tech companies, each with one section worth stealing.
- Building it: how to create brand guidelines in Figma and our brand design brief template for briefing whoever designs it.
- Publishing it: living brand guidelines on your website and what a startup press kit needs.
- Making it stick: how to roll out brand guidelines to your team.
- Moving sites at the same time: our website migration plan template for sequencing a new brand with a new site.
