Commissioning brand guidelines: what to ask an agency for and what you should receive.

01Guidelines are the brief for everyone who comes after.

Every branding project ends with a handover, and the handover is where most brands start to drift. The agency that designed the identity steps back, and from that point on the brand is produced by other people: the marketing coordinator building a social post, the sales team editing a proposal, a printer matching a colour, a web developer choosing a weight of type. None of them were in the room when the decisions were made. The guidelines are the only version of those decisions they will ever see.

That is why guidelines deserve a proper brief of their own rather than a line at the bottom of the deliverables list. When a client asks for a logo, a colour palette and a brand guidelines PDF, the agency can tick all three boxes with a twelve page document that shows the mark on white, the mark on navy and a strip of colour swatches. It looks like guidelines. It does not work like guidelines, because nobody has asked what the document needs to do.

Short answer: brief the guidelines as a working tool for named people and named tasks, and the agency will build something they can actually use.

02Start with who will use them.

The most useful thing a client can tell an agency about guidelines is who will open them. A franchise network with forty operators producing their own local marketing needs a very different document from a professional services firm where two people in marketing touch every piece of work. A business that outsources all design needs rules that a supplier can follow without interpretation. A business with an internal studio needs a system that gives experienced designers room to move.

Write down the realistic list. It usually includes marketing staff, sales and business development, external designers and printers, web and digital developers, the people who manage social channels, anyone producing internal communications, and sometimes partners, distributors or dealers. Then note what each group produces and how often. The agency can now make sensible decisions about depth, tone, format and what to leave out. Guidelines written for a non-designer read differently from guidelines written for a design studio, and the good ones often contain both layers.

When we developed guidelines for ACER, a research organisation expanding internationally, the brief included rules for creating sub-brands across its range of products and services, because that was the decision its teams would face most often. The document became a roadmap for growth rather than a record of the design.

03Ask for the thinking, not just the rules.

A visual system is the answer to a question, and guidelines that record the answer without the question age badly. Six months after launch someone will need to do something the document did not anticipate, and if they understand why the brand looks and sounds the way it does, they will make a decent decision. If they only have the rules, they will either break them or freeze.

So ask the agency to open the guidelines with the strategic foundation in plain language: who the brand is for, what it stands for, the personality it carries and the idea that holds the identity together. One or two pages is enough. This is not padding. It is the section that lets a marketing coordinator judge whether a new photograph or a new piece of copy belongs, long after the agency has moved on.

The same section is where the brand should be connected to the business. Bellman has spent 20+ years on the premise that a brand is a commercial tool, and guidelines that say so give every subsequent decision a reason. If you are weighing up what good brand guidelines and brand management should cover, that opening section is the part most agencies skip and the part your team will quote back to you.

A logo sheet tells people what the brand looks like. Guidelines tell them what to do on Tuesday morning when the designer is not in the room.

04What a complete set contains.

The exact contents depend on the brand, but a set you can run a business on will cover six areas. Treat them as a checklist for the brief and as a checklist when the first draft arrives.

Strategy and story. Positioning, audience, personality and the core idea, written for people who were not part of the project.

The visual system. Logo versions, clear space, minimum sizes, incorrect uses, colour specifications for print, screen and signage, typography with weights and hierarchy, photography and illustration direction, graphic devices and layout principles. Each rule should come with the reason it exists.

Verbal identity. Tone of voice, key messages, how the brand introduces itself in one line and one paragraph, and the words it does and does not use. For Window Design, a premium architectural product, the guidelines covered messaging and tone alongside the visual system because the brand had to carry the same restraint in words that it carried in the brandmark.

Application rules. How the system behaves on the things the business actually produces: stationery, proposals, presentations, social media, signage, vehicles, uniforms, packaging, email and the website. The guidelines we built with Ego Pharmaceuticals include dedicated social media guidelines for this reason, because a feed behaves differently from a shelf or a boardroom and the brand has to work in all three.

Governance. Who approves what, where the master files live, how to request a new asset and what to do when the rules do not cover a situation.

The files themselves. Logo files in every format and colourway, fonts and licences, colour libraries, templates and a structured asset folder. Guidelines without the files are a description of a brand nobody can produce.

05Templates are part of the deliverable.

The quickest way to find out whether guidelines work is to watch someone try to make a document with them. If the answer involves opening a blank page and reading the typography section, the brand will drift within a month. Templates close that gap, and they should be in the brief from the start rather than a follow up project once the drift becomes visible.

The templates that matter are the ones produced most often with the least design supervision: the presentation deck, the proposal or tender document, the Word letterhead and report, the email signature, the standard social post formats and the internal forms. For NEMA, a national government agency, the project began by auditing every existing template to find the problems and opportunities before a style guide and a new suite of templates were designed and tested with the internal team. That order is the right one. Audit what people make, then build the tools that make it easy to do properly.

Ask the agency which templates are included, in which software, and whether they will be tested by the people who use them. A template that only works for a designer is a design file, not a template.

06Format, maintenance and the first six months.

A PDF is still the most common format and still perfectly serviceable, provided it is designed to be searched and read on screen rather than printed. Increasingly, guidelines live online as a brand portal that links directly to the asset library, which makes updates simple and keeps everyone on the current version. Ask for the format that suits the people who will use it, and ask how the document will be updated, because it will need to be.

The brief should also cover what happens after delivery. A short training session for the teams who will apply the brand is worth more than another ten pages. So is a review at six months, when the real questions have surfaced and the guidelines can be amended to answer them. Agree who owns the master document and how changes are approved, otherwise three versions will be circulating by the end of the year.

Finally, ask to see guidelines the agency has produced for other clients before you commission anything. The depth, clarity and tone of those documents will tell you exactly what you are going to receive.

Questions we hear.