We already have a logo and a colour. Is that not a brand guideline?

Those are assets. A guideline is the set of decisions about how they are used — the minimum clear space around the logo, the smallest size it stays legible at, which colour carries an action and which is only a background, what a vendor is forbidden from doing. Assets without those decisions are exactly why five people produce five different-looking things from the same files.

How long should the document be?

Short enough that someone opens it under deadline pressure. We aim for a compact document with a single summary page at the front carrying the logo, the colour codes and the two typeface names, because that one page does most of the daily work. The rest exists for the person setting up a print job or briefing an agency.

A PDF travels well and goes stale the moment anything changes — six months later three versions are circulating and the newest is the one nobody has. For a company with vendors and a growing team we usually deliver a hosted page as the source of truth plus a PDF export for people who need something to send. We will recommend one based on how often your brand actually changes.

What if our existing brand contradicts itself?

It almost always does — three blues in circulation, two logo lockups, a typeface that was swapped in a redesign nobody documented. Part of this work is finding those contradictions and deciding them, not listing them. Where the decision is genuinely yours to make we bring you the options with a recommendation rather than guessing.

Does this include new logo files?

It includes tidying and packaging what exists — every version exported in the formats people actually ask for, named consistently, in one folder anyone can be pointed at. It does not include redrawing the mark. If the audit shows the logo itself is the problem, we will say so plainly rather than writing rules around something that does not work.

Can you write guidelines for a brand you did not design?

Yes, and it is the more common case. It takes longer, because before anything can be written down the decisions have to be recovered from whatever exists — old files, the website, printed material, the deck the sales team uses. That archaeology is the reason the price sits higher for an inherited brand than for one built in the same engagement.

UI/UX & Design

Brand guidelines your team and your vendors will actually follow

The document that settles which blue is the real blue, what nobody is allowed to do to the logo, and which file the printer gets — short enough that people open it.

From: $600–$4,000
Typical time: 2–4 weeks
Usually bought by: Scaling brands

Why a brand quietly falls apart

Nobody sets out to break a brand. It comes apart through ordinary, reasonable decisions made by people who did not have the answer to hand. Someone in marketing needed the logo to fit a wider space, so they stretched it. Someone in sales built a deck at eleven at night and picked a blue from memory. The banner supplier was sent a low-resolution PNG because that was the file in the shared drive, and it printed soft. None of those people did anything wrong. They just had no rule to follow and a deadline that would not wait.

The second version of the problem is more expensive. A company that works with outside suppliers — a printer, a packaging producer, a video editor, a freelance designer for the odd campaign — explains its brand from scratch to each of them, badly, every time. The explanation is different each time because it is being reconstructed from memory. The output is different each time as a result, and someone senior spends their week reviewing work that should never have come back wrong.

A guidelines document is not a decoration. It is the thing that stops both. It exists so that a person who has never met you can produce something on-brand without asking a question, and so that the answer to which blue is written down once instead of debated forever.

How the document gets built

Audit what already exists. Every logo file in circulation, every colour in use on the site, the deck, the packaging and the social accounts, every typeface anyone has set the brand in. This stage is mostly collection and comparison, and it is where the contradictions surface — commonly three near-identical blues, each one somebody's favourite. One to three days.
Decide the contradictions. A guideline that lists all three blues has documented the problem rather than solved it. We bring you the conflicts with a recommendation for each and get a decision recorded. This is short, but it needs your attention rather than ours alone. Half a day to a day, plus your review.
Write the rules. Logo — every approved version, minimum clear space expressed in a unit that scales with the mark itself, minimum legible size, and the forbidden list. Colour — every value in RGB and hex for screen and in CMYK for print, with a spot equivalent named where the brand goes onto packaging. Type — the typefaces, the size steps, what each level is for, and the licensed weights only. Imagery — what a photograph or illustration should look like, described in terms someone can act on. Four to eight days.
Build the asset pack. Every logo variant exported in SVG, PNG on light and dark, and a print-ready vector, named to a single convention, in a folder structure a new supplier can be pointed at without a covering email. One day.
Assemble, export and hand over. The document laid out in Figma, published as a hosted page or exported to PDF, plus a short screen recording walking through it so the first person who opens it knows where to look. One to two days.

The forbidden page is worth calling out on its own. In practice it is the most-visited part of any guideline document, because it is the only page that answers the question people actually have, which is not what is our brand but am I allowed to do this. We write it as a plain list of specific prohibitions — do not stretch the mark, do not place it on a busy photograph, do not recolour it, do not add effects — because a sentence about brand integrity stops nobody.

What decides the cost

Whether the brand was designed here or inherited. Documenting decisions we made ourselves is fast. Documenting a brand somebody else built means recovering choices that were never written down, from artefacts that disagree with each other. That archaeology is real work and it is the single biggest difference between the ends of the range.

How many places the brand has to live. A brand that appears on a website and a deck needs a fraction of what a brand needs when it also goes onto packaging, vehicle livery, uniforms and trade print. Every additional surface adds colour reproduction questions, size limits and a set of rules that has to be tested rather than assumed.

Whether it is a document or a system. A PDF is a deliverable. A hosted, versioned page that vendors are pointed at, with the asset pack alongside it, is closer to a small internal product — and it needs a decision about who owns it and how it gets updated when something changes.

Where these go wrong

Philosophy crowds out the rules. Eighty pages that open with the brand story, the values, the positioning statement and a mood essay, with the clear-space diagram somewhere around page fifty-one. You are delighted at handover and your team never opens it again. The test is simple — someone with a deadline should find the answer in under a minute, or the document has failed regardless of how good it looks.

Colour is specified for screens only. Hex codes and nothing else. Then the brand goes to print, the printer converts to CMYK with its own profile, and the blue arrives purple or the red arrives brick. Print colour is a decision, not a conversion — it needs CMYK values chosen deliberately, a spot colour named where consistency matters, and an acknowledgement of which stocks and laminates will shift it anyway.

The contradictions get documented rather than decided. The audit finds three blues, two logo lockups and an inconsistent typeface, and all of it goes into the guideline as the palette and our marks. Nothing has been resolved; the document has simply made the ambiguity official, and the drift continues with a PDF to justify it. Deciding is the uncomfortable part of this job and it is most of the value in it.

See where the site stands before you brief anyone.

If the site is already live, start from what it scores rather than from a guess. The audit reports what it checked, what it found, and — the part most tools leave out — what it could not check, and why.

See the website audit Talk about this work

Questions people ask before they commit.

We already have a logo and a colour. Is that not a brand guideline?: Those are assets. A guideline is the set of decisions about how they are used — the minimum clear space around the logo, the smallest size it stays legible at, which colour carries an action and which is only a background, what a vendor is forbidden from doing. Assets without those decisions are exactly why five people produce five different-looking things from the same files.
How long should the document be?: Short enough that someone opens it under deadline pressure. We aim for a compact document with a single summary page at the front carrying the logo, the colour codes and the two typeface names, because that one page does most of the daily work. The rest exists for the person setting up a print job or briefing an agency.
PDF or a web page?: A PDF travels well and goes stale the moment anything changes — six months later three versions are circulating and the newest is the one nobody has. For a company with vendors and a growing team we usually deliver a hosted page as the source of truth plus a PDF export for people who need something to send. We will recommend one based on how often your brand actually changes.
What if our existing brand contradicts itself?: It almost always does — three blues in circulation, two logo lockups, a typeface that was swapped in a redesign nobody documented. Part of this work is finding those contradictions and deciding them, not listing them. Where the decision is genuinely yours to make we bring you the options with a recommendation rather than guessing.
Does this include new logo files?: It includes tidying and packaging what exists — every version exported in the formats people actually ask for, named consistently, in one folder anyone can be pointed at. It does not include redrawing the mark. If the audit shows the logo itself is the problem, we will say so plainly rather than writing rules around something that does not work.
Can you write guidelines for a brand you did not design?: Yes, and it is the more common case. It takes longer, because before anything can be written down the decisions have to be recovered from whatever exists — old files, the website, printed material, the deck the sales team uses. That archaeology is the reason the price sits higher for an inherited brand than for one built in the same engagement.

Often taken together.

Start with the brief, not the invoice.

Send what you are trying to achieve. You get a written scope, a price and a date — or an honest “this is not the right service for that”.

Talk about Brand guidelines / style guide All UI/UX & Design services