Brand Guidelines Examples and What to Put in Yours

The best brand guidelines examples share one trait: anyone, from a designer to a new starter in sales, can open them and produce something that looks and sounds like the same business. This guide walks through what strong guidelines contain, what we can learn from public examples (including GOV.UK and NHS Scotland), how to write a tone of voice section people will actually use, and a checklist you can work through for your own business.

TL;DR

• Brand guidelines are a rulebook for your visual identity and your voice. Their job is consistency across people, teams and suppliers, not decoration.
• A complete set covers purpose and positioning, logo, colour, typography, imagery, tone of voice, and real-world applications.
• The strongest public examples are specific: exact colour values, exact wording rules, and clear ownership of who approves what.
• Treat guidelines as a living document that is easy to find and update, not a 100-page PDF nobody opens.
• Your tone of voice section should work like a control panel with behaviours and scenarios, not a list of friendly adjectives.

Table of Contents

• What brand guidelines are for
• Brand guidelines examples worth studying
• What to include: a brand guidelines checklist
• Visual identity guidelines: getting the details right
• Brand voice and tone of voice guidelines
• From PDF to living document
• How long should brand guidelines be?
• Our view: guidelines should make work faster
• When to get help building yours
• Common mistakes to avoid
• FAQ
• Sources

What brand guidelines are for

Brand guidelines (also called a brand style guide or brand book) are the document that explains how your brand looks, sounds and behaves. They answer small questions before they become arguments: which blue, how much space around the logo, whether you say “customers” or “clients”, whether a LinkedIn post can use an emoji.

The point is not control for its own sake. Industry guidance describes good guidelines as a roadmap that lets non-designers produce on-brand material, with concrete instructions on logo usage, typography and tone rather than vague vibes. If your guidelines only say “modern and friendly”, they will not stop a freelancer, a marketing assistant or a printer from making different choices.

They matter more as you grow. The moment a second person writes your emails, a third agency builds a landing page, or a franchise partner prints a flyer, your brand starts to drift. We cover the commercial side of that in why consistent branding builds trust.

Brand guidelines examples worth studying

Most lists of examples are galleries of famous logos. That is fun, but not very useful if you run a 20-person company in Oxfordshire. We find it more helpful to look at public guidelines through one question: what does this document do well that we can borrow at our scale?

GOV.UK: precision and accessibility

The GOV.UK Brand Guidelines put clarity, accessibility, accuracy and consistency at the front, and reference WCAG 2.2 compliance. The colour section is equally direct: the core brand colours are Primary blue and Accent teal, with the aim of supporting recognition and trust. The palette page also reminds teams that contrast and accessibility remain the responsibility of whoever uses the colours.

What to borrow: give exact values (hex, RGB, CMYK, and where relevant Pantone), state your accessibility standard, and say who is responsible for checking it. Colour swatches without contrast guidance are only half a rule.

NHS Scotland: ownership and wording

The NHS Scotland Brand Policy is a good example of a brand used by many different organisations. It sets out guiding principles and who manages the brand, and it makes even small points explicit, such as writing “NHS Scotland” as two words.

What to borrow: guidelines are not only about the logo. Naming conventions, capitalisation and spelling are brand rules too, and they are the ones people break most often. Name an owner for the brand, so questions have somewhere to go.

Walmart: voice linked to principles

Walmart’s brand voice page sets out voice principles that it describes as a translation of its wider brand principles, and applies them from social feeds to in-store experience. You do not need Walmart’s scale to copy the logic: every voice trait should trace back to something the brand actually believes.

A British Council lesson: where the guidelines live

The format matters as much as the content. The British Council moved from scattered drives and static files to a central digital hub for its brand assets, reporting better consistency and asset reuse. You do not need an enterprise platform. A well-organised shared folder or a simple web page, with the current logo files, templates and the guidelines in one place, solves the same problem: people stop using whatever file they found in an old email.

What to include: a brand guidelines checklist

There is no single correct table of contents, but a document that covers the following will serve most businesses. Use it as a checklist and tick off what you already have.

If you are earlier in the process and still defining the basics, read our practical guide to brand identity and our overview of the most important elements of branding first. Guidelines document decisions; they cannot replace them.

Visual identity guidelines: getting the details right

Visual identity guidelines are the part most people picture when they hear “brand guidelines”. Here is what separates a useful section from a decorative one.

Logo rules that people can follow

Show the logo in every version you actually use: full colour, single colour, reversed on dark backgrounds, and a compact version for small spaces such as social avatars. Then add the practical limits:

• Clear space: the minimum margin around the logo, usually expressed in relation to a part of the logo itself so it scales.
• Minimum size: the smallest size at which the logo stays legible, for print and screen separately.
• Misuse examples: three or four visual “don’ts”, such as stretching, recolouring or placing on busy photography.

Showing the wrong way is often more effective than describing the right way.

Colour with a job for each shade

A palette of eight colours with no hierarchy invites chaos. Say which colour leads, which supports, and which is reserved for calls to action or warnings. Give a rough proportion, for instance one dominant colour, one supporting, and accents used sparingly. Test text and background pairings for contrast, as GOV.UK’s approach to accessibility shows, and list the pairings that pass.

Typography you can actually use

A common failure: the brand font is a paid typeface that nobody outside the design team has installed. Specify a fallback that works in Word, Google Docs and email, and set out a simple hierarchy: heading, subheading, body, caption, with sizes and weights. Two typefaces are usually plenty.

Imagery and graphic elements

Describe photography the way you would brief a photographer: natural light or studio, real staff or stock, close crops or wide environmental shots, colour treatment. Include a few approved example images and a few rejects. If you commission photography, a consistent shoot can become the visual backbone of your guidelines, which is why we often pair brand work with photography and video.

Brand voice and tone of voice guidelines

Visual rules get all the attention, but most daily brand decisions are written. Emails, proposals, LinkedIn posts, website copy, job adverts: all of it either sounds like you or does not. Grammarly’s guidance on documenting brand voice makes the point that as more people speak and write for a business, they need shared standards to keep a unified voice.

Make it a control panel, not an essay

Listing adjectives such as “friendly, professional, innovative” gives writers nothing to act on. Practitioners recommend that a brand voice section works like a control panel: each trait gets a behavioural definition (for example, “direct means opening with the answer”), and a tone matrix shows how energy and formality shift by scenario, such as a product launch compared with an incident update.

A simple structure that works for most businesses:

1. Three or four voice traits. Each with a one-line definition and a behaviour.
2. Do and don’t pairs. “We say ‘get in touch’. We don’t say ‘do not hesitate to contact us’.”
3. A tone by situation chart. The voice stays constant, the tone flexes.
4. Vocabulary. Preferred terms, banned phrases, how you refer to customers, spelling (British English, Oxford comma or not).
5. Before and after samples. One off-brand paragraph rewritten on-brand.

A sample tone of voice chart

This is the kind of table we mean. It is an illustration, not a real client’s document.

Notice what this does: a junior colleague writing an apology knows to lower the energy and open with the fix, without having to guess.

Keep it flexible

One caution from practitioners: rigid, universal rules can stifle creativity. The better approach is a short list of non-negotiables (logo usage, primary colours, key terminology) alongside modular templates for emails, presentations and social posts that let teams adapt within the frame.

From PDF to living document

A widespread assumption is that brand guidelines should be a long, polished PDF. In practice, modern guidelines are often living, searchable hubs, so teams and external suppliers always use the latest approved assets instead of old attachments.

For most small and mid-sized businesses, this does not mean buying software. It means:

• One location (a shared drive folder or a private web page) that everyone knows.
• Logo files in the formats people need: SVG or EPS for printers, PNG for presentations, and a small web-ready version.
• A short version of the guidelines, one or two pages, for people who will never read the full document.
• A date and version number on the document, and a named person to ask.

If you have ever received a logo as a screenshot from a supplier, you know why this matters.

How long should brand guidelines be?

As long as your business needs, and no longer. A sole-trader-scale brand might manage on ten pages. A multi-site organisation with several sub-brands may need considerably more. The test is whether a new starter can find the answer to a practical question in under a minute.

A useful approach is two layers: a quick-reference summary covering logo, colours, fonts and three voice rules, and a deeper reference for the people who produce material every week.

Our view: guidelines should make work faster

We work with businesses across Oxfordshire on branding, websites, photography, video, social and paid campaigns, and we see the same pattern. Brand guidelines fail not because they are badly designed, but because they were built as a one-off project and then never connected to day-to-day work.

This is one reason we built Hook as a single team rather than a set of separate specialists. When the people who design your logo also build your website and shoot your photography, the guidelines are used by the people making the work, so they stay accurate. You also avoid the coordination problem of passing a PDF between three agencies and hoping each interprets it the same way.

Our advice for any business writing guidelines:

• Write rules you can explain. If you cannot say why a rule exists, drop it.
• Show, do not describe. Examples of correct and incorrect use beat paragraphs of text.
• Include the voice from day one, not as an afterthought to the logo.
• Plan for changes. Brands evolve, and a document that cannot be updated quickly will be ignored.

— Hook

When to get help building yours

You can write a first version yourself using the checklist above. It is worth bringing in a team when your brand is changing, when several suppliers need to work from the same rulebook, or when you suspect the identity itself needs to be sharper before you document it.

At Hook, our branding and design service covers logo and identity systems, brand strategy and positioning, and graphic design, and we can carry the guidelines through into your website, photography, video and social content. Project scopes are tailored to what you need rather than forced into packages, and you get a client portal for updates and direct communication. You can look at our design portfolio for examples of the work, or book a free marketing consultation to talk through where your brand stands today.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Documenting a brand that is not decided. If your positioning is unclear, the guidelines will simply record the confusion.
• Forgetting the writing. Visual rules without voice rules leave half your brand unmanaged.
• No examples. Rules without sample applications are hard to apply.
• No owner. If nobody maintains the document, it becomes outdated within a year.
• Too many rules. If people need training to follow it, they will work around it.
• Ignoring accessibility. Colour contrast and readable type are brand decisions as well as legal and ethical ones.

FAQ

What should brand guidelines include?

At minimum: your brand purpose and positioning, logo rules, colour palette, typography, imagery style, tone of voice, and examples of the brand applied to real materials. Add governance, meaning who approves exceptions and where the latest files live. The checklist table above sets this out section by section.

What is the difference between a brand style guide and brand guidelines?

In everyday use the terms overlap. A style guide often refers to the visual and writing rules (logo, colour, type, voice), while brand guidelines can also include strategy, such as purpose, values and positioning. Do not worry about the label: cover both the thinking and the practical rules.

How do I write a tone of voice document?

Pick three or four traits, define each as a behaviour, and add do and don’t examples in your real writing. Then add a short chart showing how formality and energy change by situation, such as a social post compared with a contract email. Finish with a before and after sample so writers can see the voice in action.

How often should brand guidelines be updated?

Review them at least once a year, and whenever you launch a new channel, change your logo or shift your positioning. Keep a version number and date on the document, and make sure old files are removed from shared folders so nobody uses outdated assets.

Do small businesses need brand guidelines?

Yes, in a lighter form. Even a two-page summary with your logo files, colours, fonts and three voice rules saves time every time someone new designs, writes or prints something for you. You can expand it as the business grows.

Sources

• GOV.UK Brand Guidelines: Data
• GOV.UK Brand Guidelines: GOV.UK is a blue brand
• GOV.UK Brand Guidelines: Colour
• NHS Scotland Brand Policy
• Walmart Brand Center: Brand Voice
• British Council customer story
• How to document brand voice guidelines (Grammarly Business)
• Brand Voice Guide
• 30 best brand guideline examples (Vistaprint)
• 19 brand guidelines examples (Frontify)

Recommended

• Brand identity explained: a practical guide for businesses
• What Are the Most Important Elements of Branding?
• Why consistent branding builds trust: a practical guide
• How to brief a design agency: a practical guide