Every time whenever a brand agency wants to build a brand, it would always understand something called brand guidelines. It involves a set of rules that are used to create the composition, design, and overall look and feel of a particular brand.
Brand guidelines are often known as style guides or brand identity rules. They describe how communication for a brand should happen. Manufacturers usually share the guidelines with the advertising team, influencers partnering with them, investors and PR specialists. It helps these people to ensure reinforced awareness of the particular brand across all mediums.
There are many brands across the world that have created the most effective brand guidelines that led to enhanced customer awareness. The consistency with respect to the design elements, such as images, logos, colour palette, and fonts, has made these brand campaigns memorable.
In this article, the SEO Toronto Experts will share the top fifty examples of brand guidelines that are successful in creating memories for the target audience and successfully connecting with them. You will also learn about various ways in which these brands are able to captivate their audience with the help of their brand guidelines.
Table of Contents
Top 50 Successful Brand Guidelines Around the World
Adidas:
Adidas’ brand guidelines mainly focus on its logo for corporate branding. The document prescribing the guidelines also offers details on specific dimensions of each horizontal bar that are similar to one another, providing clear and precise instructions to the designers and marketers working on its campaigns.
Alterior:
Alterior Apparel’s brand guidelines are created in such a way as to ensure its marketing campaign aligns with the brand’s mission. The guidelines offer a few colour combinations, using its brand colour palette as a visual for how they blend and work together.
American Red Cross:
Compared to other brands that have multiple pages for brand guidelines, American Red Cross has a printable poster that is easy for marketers to understand. Its one-page document does a brilliant job of including all the details one may need to get a wide picture of the brand and work accordingly.
Barre & Soul:
Barre & Soul, a health and fitness studio, offers multiple versions of its logo that allow options for marketers, influencers, and promoters. It also provides some suitable examples of using the images and logo on image backgrounds with different colour palettes that help the brand stand out.
Boy Scouts of America:
This brand has various emblems and badges that people can use for marketing and promotion purposes. It has 90-page guidelines that offer detailed information describing how to use its imagery and messages across various channels, emails, and various other platforms. It also has a comprehensive section describing the design and layout that helps the councils and packs involved in this organization to create their own websites.
Coulee Bank:
The brand guidelines of Coulee bank are a great example of minimalistic, non lenghty brand campaigns. Although it is short, it includes all the basics, such as logo placement, typography, and alternative logos.
Denver Public School:
This school is a great example of how brand guidelines are beneficial for educational institutions. It has a 50-page document that explains all the details regarding the creation of the organization’s websites and webpages, various department logos, colours, and typography.
Dropbox:
This brand sets the guidelines for its branding in a unique manner on a website built by it. It includes links with pages that has information about its logo, layouts, customer journey, and various other things.
EduGames:
The brand guidelines of EduGames makes a playful use of primary colours. It helps the users to quickly note that its products are specially made for children. EduGames also adds information about real people who play the games offered in it, along with the branding information of its partnerships. Such things can be rarely found in brand standards.
Fabric IT:
This brand has a branding kit that is visually appealing as it is placed on a dark gray background. This guide has a design that also has a great introduction to the IT-based services of the brand.
FacePalm:
Face Palm is a skincare and cosmetic brand. It highlights its natural products in its brand guidelines by showing illustrations and pictures of palm leaves and models with fresh faces. This brand does a compelling job of of sharing its story and describing its target audience.
Forty Five Fabulous:
This brand focuses on selling products to middle-aged women. Its brand guidelines display various pictures of women in their middle stages of life. It drives home the idea of its target audience and how they can benefit from the brand.
Foursquare:
The older version of Foursquare’s guidelines explains the things to avoid while using its logo and logo mark, which also includes the use of some colour combinations in a blend.
Hummer:
General Motors, which is one of the biggest car manufacturers, revived its Hummer brand. GM recognized the shift from gas-guzzling SUVs(for which the Hummer brand was famous) to electric vehicles and introduced the Hummer brand as a bunch of electric off-road SUVs. Hummer uses a lot of images in its brand guidelines to showcase its history and its transformation. Its main focus is to continue as an adventure-focused brand it really was in its initial days.
Instagram:
Instagram is the most popular social media platform that has a separate webpage dedicated to its brand guidelines. It has an easy format that allows partners to bookmark and use it for future preferences.
IRT Flexicare:
The standards of this brand effectively showcase several examples of ads to the marketers. These examples help marketers specify how to use the brand’s assets in various forms, such as large posters and multi-page brochures.
Jamie Oliver:
This brand’s guidelines show how a brand run by a single person can benefit from setting particular standards, such as an organization with multiple departments. These departments also showcase the motto of the brand “Keep it Simple,” in an exemplary manner with the help of minimalistic pages and instructions.
Jetlag:
Jetlag keeps its aesthetics to be vintage and nostalgic in its brand guide. This nature of the brand is visually showcased across the pages of the guidelines. It attracts its audience with the help of bright colours that are blended with a cream-coloured background.
J&J Farms:
It offers a simple guide involving a lot of helpful info for partners and designers. It has descriptions that describe the staff uniforms , shopping bags, and shipping bags, apart from the logos, images, and colour palette it requires people to use.
Kindthread:
This brand uses a set of clear and straightforward instructions that will help users to use its logos and designs properly. For example, rather than providing specific measurements for spacing, it will say allow the height of the letter “K” around all sides of its logo.
Lollicup:
This brand has concept guidelines that target its personality, from its iconography section with attractive illustrations of the fruits it uses in its products.
McDonald’s McDelivery:
McDonald’s McDelivery has a 40-page document consisting of guidelines. It offers a comprehensive look at the brand and the design it uses. It offers various examples of messaging and logo usage that are particularly detailed to be useful for the designers. Its legal sections ensure the designs are legally compatible and don’t invite any implications.
Medium:
Being a publishing website, Medium has several pages dedicated to guidelines, along with its typography and design. It has some extraordinary standards for the different types of posts it publishes, how they should appear on mobile phones, and how the mobile and desktop sites should appear with dark and light interfaces.
Meridian:
Meridian is a famous audio company which has some excellent guidelines that detail the messaging standards of the brand really well.
Miami Dolphins:
Brand guidelines also work well for professional sports teams, the greatest example being Miami Dolphins. It has a section on community impact that is beneficial for various potential partners to read.
Myrtle Beach:
This beach has brand guidelines that explain very well why this place is more than just a beach. The guidelines include various examples of keywords, phrasing, and messaging that can be beneficial for marketers.
NASA:
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has an in-depth standards manual that shows its logo on everything from space shuttles to vehicles to detail what it should look like in any situation.
Nike Pro Services:
The brand manual of Nike’s pro services is quite easy to understand and makes its branding elements easy to use. This technique allows the users to have a concise look at the colours, logos, and patterns permitted by the brand without getting distracted.
NJORD:
NJORD is an organic restaurant that uses minimalist yet eye catchy design to connect with the customers. It has some unique style suggestions to change its menu colouring and reflect different seasons.
Northwest School:
The Northwest School has some brand guidelines that will precisely highlight how the website of the school, along with its online magazines should look like on desktops and cellphones.
Olipop:
Olipop’s brand guidelines allow designers to use colours and pictures in a wonderful manner. It helps them highlight its different varieties and give examples of how you can show them off in marketing materials.
OnePort:
This brand offers straightforward guidelines in accordance with colours, corporate materials, and logo placements. It has a separate section on image applications that varies from the norm, giving some examples of using overlays in a proper manner to boost or add interesting elements to the pictures.
Optus:
This brand is the best example of how to use your brand mascot for conveying information. The brand guidelines allow the designers to use its mascot in an attractive manner that will surely drive customers and provide them useful info about the brand.
Reddit:
Reddit has a 54-page guideline section which also includes a terms of use column. In that column, the brand outlines a few key points for the use of graphics and brand assets that will ensure consistency across all outlets.
Rind Candle and Co:
This candle brand outlines its preference for textures, patterns, and colours with the help of playful illustrations in its guidelines. It represents the kind of personality it wants to display.
Skype:
A software known for connecting people via video calls together, Skype’s brand guidelines will take a step further to help others understand the brand’s original mission. It has a conversational approach that works well and is engaging due to a light-hearted introductory comic strip.
Shazam:
The music streaming service called Shazam is famous for its logo and a simplistic blue-and-white colour scheme. However, it has a style guide that offers various other options for colour and monochromatic logos that give designers few other options.
Sleeping Bear Wildlife Fund:
Many users get attracted to webpages that have clean designs along with plenty of spacing that keeps eyes focused on the content. Sleeping Bar Wildlife Fund is one such example, which uses a simple guideline that explains various types of logo files that designers and marketers may get and the best ways to use them to clear any confusion.
SR2/Socially Responsible Recruitment:
This brand has its own beloved mascot dog throughout its brand guidelines. This ensures marketers and designers realize the importance of using the mascot. It also involves another section that describes the importance of messaging via marketing materials.
Starbucks:
Starbucks, the world-famous coffee chain, has a set of interactive guidelines. These guidelines use simple navigation to move through the mission, logos, voice, and photography of the company. Its main motto is to have a clean design that offers important info to the users without any hassles.
Several other prominent branding examples include:
- The Body Shop at Home UK.
- The Good Kids Brand Studio.
- The Home Planner Co.
- The Museum of Bad Art.
- Tropicana Las Vegas.
- Truth.
- Urban Outfitters.
- Visa Digital.
- Youtube.
- Zoom.
Conclusion
Having an exemplary brand guideline can help you achieve the best possible outcomes. The abovementioned examples are just a few of the many brands that were able to drive success due to clear brand guideline. Hence, you need to have a set of clear and concise brand guidelines that will help you attract your audience effectively.
