Transcripts
1. Class Trailer: Hey, my name is
Jeremy. I've been a brand and web design
for ten years now, and I'm going to share
everything I know about building brand systems
and guidelines for your client projects
so they can have a consistent brand
across all touch points. I'll be showing you how to structure your brand guidelines, so clients actually
understand it. I'll show you the
key parts of what to include and what not to include
in the brand guidelines. I'll show you some
inspiration examples. I'll also be sharing
some free templates where you can plug and play your own guidelines in there to speed
up the workflow. I'll show you how to package and deliver brand guidelines
to your clients, all the file types, how I do it, and all the best practices. I'll also be showing
you multiple different tools and ways building your brand
guidelines online, plug ins and some other
methods of doing it. A should be sharing some
common mistakes to avoid. It's perfect for
freelancers, designers, or even marketers
who want to learn the basics of building out
your brand guidelines. If you're a beginner to intermediate and you want
to learn how to do this, then enroll in the class,
and I'll see you in there, looking forward to seeing how you create your
brand guidelines.
2. What are brand guidelines: This my job will be
sharing the basis of what a brand guideline is. So if you're a beginner, this will help
give some clarity. Brand guideline is a tool, a system that you
share with a client to make sure that they're
going to be consistent across all brand touch points. So when you deliver the
brand, the final design, the logo, the identity, you want to make sure
that the socials look the same as their website, it's the same as Instagram, it's the same as Facebook, same as across all platforms. And so it's all
about consistency. Now, when it comes to
a brand guideline, it's not hard rules. You want to sort of see it as a living evolving
organism where over time, they can add to the guidelines, and they can improve it, make it better, or
if they've created some new brand assets or marketing tools in the
company or products, then they can add
to the guidelines to make sure it
covers everything. And so it usually gets
updated slowly over time. Now, typically, the
guidelines will be for a marketing
team, a design team, when someone's working with a freelancer,
they're outsourcing, then you'll share the guidelines with that freelancer so they can design according
to the brand. So they carry across the
same voice and tone, the same colors, you know, fonts and all those things that make the brand have
its core personality. Sometimes you might want to
use jargon, design a jargon, but usually want to keep the
brand guides pretty simple and clean just so it's
easy to understand. In the next module,
I'll share some of my favorite tools to building
great brand guidelines.
3. What tools should I use to make brand guidelines : One of my favorite
tools I love to use is obviously Adobe Illustrator
is my favorite. I've used it for
a very long time. I used to use Indesign
for brand guidelines, and there are some
great tuples out there, but I just find Illustrator
is really good with text, and I'm very fast with that. So that's just personally
what I like to use. In design is great
because you've got master pages and you
can save styles. You can also do styles
in Illustrator, as well. If you're a Figma guy,
you can go into Figma. Figma is just great because
you can have infinite Canvas, a lot of different slides, and it's easier to share
a link with your client. And I think that is really
good about these tools. You have full design control. If you're someone that
wants full control, then use either
Figma or Illustrator or Affinity designer
if you're into that. Another great tool is
Bravemar bravemar.co. I will share my
Affiliate Link as well. If you do want to play
around with it. It is free. They also have a
pro module as well. It's basically an online
brand guideline tool where you can build guidelines, and then you can share a
link with your client. So I'll show a quick
example of one of the clients real client project
that I had Keyso Media. And here's me using Brave
Mark, as you can see, everything is modular
and it comes into these cards and
sections that you can add to. You
can add the logo. You can add images. You can
add primary brand colors, and they can click
the color swatch. You got typography, and then you can add
whatever you like. So what you can do is actually
you can publish this, and on the side, you can
view it in mobile version. You can change it to portrait. You've got border styles, drop shadows. You
can add colors. You just click on the
section you want and your left click and then you
add your image in there. You can change the
text. You can change the layout as well as you
can see.Re easy to do. You can change the
size of your logo. You can change the
background color. So just showing you
a quick way on how to use that and then
you can see the draft. They also have some templates
as well that you can use premade templates
from other designers. For example, let's just
click on this one. So someone did a
project already. So if you like this
layout and template, you can just go to
the bottom and click Remix Template and it'll add it to your dashboard,
which is pretty cool. So I think that's really
cool. They obviously still building they're young starter. They're still building it out. But I think this
is a great tool. If you don't want to
do stuff from scratch, you can do something like this. It's another brand I
just simple and clean. And then you can basically
publish that site. And then once it's published, you know, you can
clone the project, you can view the
published project. You can share as a template. This other one is
called guidelines. It's guidelines dot SIT, and this one is another
tool that was used. One of my friends designed
the identity for them. But yeah, it's modern. You can import Figma files, and they have a $15
plan or a free plan. So I'll just show the
back end real quick. I haven't really
used this too much, but you can see it just gives you some pre made layouts
where you can come in here. You know, I can jump in here
and drop load in an image. You can drop in your
logo files, et cetera. So that's if you want
to do a page design, and then you can publish it. If you go to the navigation,
you can also have like a sidebar and change
the menus and scrolling. And then
you've got the brand. So there's pages
navigation and brand, and then so you can see you
can upload your logo files. So you just drag in the files, and it'll automatically
understand if it's a PNG, it'll get the color
swatch for you, you can add spot colors to see on M on the
right hand side. Then you can also add
the brand colors so you can come in here,
upload your fonts here. Then you got typography
and then files, extra files, 100 megabytes,
which is pretty cool. Obviously, you're going
to get 100 megabytes of storage on your free plan. So that's another tool
that I would recommend. The other one is
core boook dot IO. So I did I used it a while ago. So you can see, basically
this is the backend. It gives you a sidebar
where you can put, you know, all the brand values, typography, you know, colors, social media style
guide, whatever, images. And it basically
has just modules. So you can add modules. You got basic heading texts. You got images, media, other so Figma files, downloads, et cetera, and then you can preview. So
this is what it looks like. They do have like
core book studio, and then they have one just
for bigger corporate clients. So you can import your Figma
files, which is pretty cool. But the pricing model, it is 69 a month, so
it's a bit steep. So it's probably better for
agencies, but I don't know. I don't personally use it,
but this is another option. Another great option
would be framer. You could build your
own bank guard lines on a framer site, and then every time
you have a client you can upload all the files on there and just instead of doing the whole physical like a PDF, you can just do an
online brand book. And if you're actually
on Frain type Brand guidelines
website templates, sometimes you do
find some free ones. There's obviously paid ones as well that you could
use or you could build your own template with AI or from scratch and then
just save it as a template. So there's a few
good examples here. For example, let's just
click on this one and preview it just to show you an example of what you could do. I'm previewing the website
and the cool thing is, you don't even have
to buy a domain. You can just do the free framer domain that
they give you, which is good. So this is really
clean, really simple, as you can see here,
download the logo pack, so you'd click on this
button and it'll download. You got the colors, typography. So it's just one massive scroll, and then you got
the download links, which I think is mad. I
do like having a sidebar. I think it's really
easy to navigate for clients when they're on
the phone or website. So I think this is a good
example of what you can do for a guideline. And
I'd recommend that. Now, if you're an
Illustrator person and you want to use a plug in, you could use Guided from A Kriv. And so this is
what it looks like. It basically gives you a
guideline template where you can create a whole template and will generate the template
for you in Illustrator, and then you can select
the colors logos and share it with your clients, which I think is really cool. And the price is 79. For the whole year, and you do get the two other plug ins, which is grid and presenter. I'm not going to show
that now, but let's just go I went to Window Extension and you
get the extension here, as you can see, which is cool. So first, you want to
select your brand assets. So let's just for example, let's do this my own brand
for Mirror Design page. We'll set the logo,
the logo type. We don't have that
set the full logo. So you can set multiple things. We'll go Mirror Design co, fonts, then we can select
the primary color. Then once you've got that, we can template and
then click Generate. Well, I'll say it's ready, and you can see it's generated brand guidelines
with edible text, the colors, and you can even edit the
stroke on this as well. As you can see, So yeah,
some nice templates. Makes it really nice to present if you don't have
your own template yet. Then what you can do, you can change your
template if you want, and you can apply changes, or if you change the color, maybe you want to
change the color, the main color, the
secondary wood. And there we have it
as a quick example of you can change fonts
and colors really fast. So I think this is a
great plug in to you.
4. Great examples and inspiration of guidelines: Small Jo, I'll be showing
you some great examples of brand guidelines that you can learn from and also
some free templates that I found that I think
would be really great. First one is
brandingstyguides.com. They have a massive archive
that you can check out. So for example, maybe you
want to check out bolt. I'll click on this. And you
can download the PDF file. It shows you who designed
it. So this was by Koto, and they've got heaps of
different guidelines on here. Let's just go and download
the PDF real quick. These are their guidelines
that they design, probably did it in Figma
or something like that. So this is an AI
vibe coding brand. I love the bento
box here, images, typography, clean and simple. So if you go to dee Gallery, this one's a free one, as well, so you can see a heaps
of different ones. I think they've got at least 100 on here that you can check out. For example, let's
just check out perplexity. Click on that. And I think this
one's a pitch deck. So they have pitch
decks on here, which is really cool, so you can
see how they pitched. Amazing design. And then if you want to click on Guideline, you can check out
some guidelines here. So maybe you want to
check out Burger King or Hulu or Zapia,
whatever you want. Click on ZapiGuidelines, and we can see what
they've done here. Corporate and clean type of guideline. So I think
that's really good. Another great one is Dropbox. Dropbox has an amazing one. You scroll through. It's
terractive. It's nice. It gives you these blocks and say, I want to
check out the logo. We can click that,
scroll through. And this one is great. A great design and web version. Obviously, they have a lot of
budgets so they can create all this nice motion and animation things and
stuff that you can see. Or that this is a great example. We've got motion. Very cool. I will make sure
all the links are in the resource section
so you can check it out. This one from resend, this
one's pretty good, too. I just like you can press M and change from Light
Moe to Dark Moe. Thought that was really cool.
And we can click on that. This one, I think is an
AI company, I think, so you can see how they
designed their ones. What the color palette. You can click and just
copy the hex codes really easily, which I love. You want to make it
easy to just get access to the files as
easy as possible. And if you put your mouse over, you can just, like, click
and download the file. So it'll give you a zip of
that logo file, which is cool. One from Rcraft I
really like as well. This is a minimal one,
but it's really nice. Is a generative AI platform. So you can see how they
did the colors and type So this is the best way just to look at other guidelines and
then learn from them. And guidelines will be bigger or smaller depending
on how many things. Some companies have
illustrations and, you know, buttons and motion. These will play videos here. I'll show you the logo
shots and all that stuff. So this is great. I did find a free
template for Figma, if you like using Figma. This is from Abdul. He's his Twitter, if
you want to follow him. But he gave this away
for free recently, and I thought this was a really good template
for beginners out there. So you got the Band foundation
Logo, Carla typography. He really did a
good job. They put a lot of effort into
this, I can tell. So I think this is a great way a great template
you could use to start off with your
brand projects. I'll definitely check that out, and I think that
would be really cool. Next, we'll just
breakdown a bit more on what to include in
the brand guideline.
5. What to include in guidelines: Lesson I'll be sharing
what you should actually include in
a brand guideline. I showed you in the
previous lesson of some of these bigger, more elaborate guidelines
from bigger brands. But what if it's
just a smaller brand and they just have a logo, colors and fonts?
That's basically. You just start off putting the
guideline with the basics, the logos, the dos and don'ts. You got to think
about what the client actually needs and what is
it going to actually use, especially with a
smaller freelance or a smaller business that's
just starting out. They're not going to have time create all these assets
and go crazy with it. They just need something
simple that they can quickly get the hex code or quickly get the logo files
and just run with the brand. Now, I think the most
essential sections you should have you should for
the smaller businesses, you should talk about the brand values, mission, and goal, and the tone of voice,
so the messaging, tag line slogans. I think those are part
of the, you know, strategy or the brand
identity of the business. And I think that's really
important to include, especially for the
smaller businesses, so they can remind themselves,
Okay, this is how we talk. This is some of how we write certain
statements or messages. Next, you should
have the logo usage. Show the dos and
don'ts of the logo, how the logo is used. Clear space of the logo, the main logo, and the
variations, the icons, when to use those logos
in specific formats, then you want to
cover the colors. So brand colors. You might have a few colors or a
big range of colors, and then you want to show
the hex codes, CMYK, RGB, the hex, and then
the pantone colors if the company is
doing pantone print. Next, you want to definitely
show the font system or typography system where it will break down the
headlines, the body copy. And then for website
stuff, you want H one, h2h 3h4h6, and then paragraph styles if they're going to
be on a website. So typically, I would
include that and then any other typography
layouts that you have, then you'll jump into
things like visual assets, whether it's patterns,
a business card layout, it could be fliers, posters, layouts, email
signature layouts, and you just want to
show the design of it. Things like photography
is important as well. So, does it need a special
color treatment on it? Does it have any effects? Is it just the style
of photography? Like, should you
have bright images, natural lighting or should
it be outdoor stuff? Should there be smiling
or should it be like, sort of a dark, artistic type of style? So really got to think
about these things. And so all the visual
asset stuff is optional. If you want to break down
things like illustrations or maybe it's an AI company
and you want to do an AI prompt guide where
you share what to prompt and what creek
words to use when using, say, you know, Rcraft or Mid journey or free Pi,
whatever they're using. And then everything
else becomes extra. If they only include things
that they actually need, but obviously, if it's
a big brand and there's a lot of moving parts, you
want to include all of that. Next, I'll be
sharing some common mistakes to avoid and also how to communicate clearly on
your brand guidelines.
6. Common mistakes designers make: Some of the common
mistakes is having too much information
on the slides, someone's not going to read
the whole brand guidelines. People are busy, you
know, they don't have time to sit
there and read it. So you just keep things clear, use bold headlines, dot
points, simple text. Don't overexplain things, try
and avoid design or jargon, even though designers most
likely will be reading it. Try and keep things as simple as possible
because remember, some of these
smaller people don't have designers to
explain things to them, so they might have to just
figure it out themselves. Sometimes I share my
offboarding guide to share file types and stuff
like that with the clients. That really helps them just make this process more smoother. It as a system that
can be expanded upon where you can generate more slides,
add more things in, and make sure it's easier
to upload to things like Canva or other free tools
where your client can easily edit them themselves
instead of them having to buy illustrate or in design when they don't
know how to use a tool. And another mistake that I do see is designers not charging
for the brand guidelines. Typically, it would be 10%
of the total project value. So let's say you're doing
a logo design for $2,000. Typically, the guidelines will
be 200 bucks if it's 10%. It's a key in part. Try to always include it
in your packages. If a client says, Oh,
I just need a logo, say, no, I need to
include guidelines. Even if you just do
it like a simple one, templated one for
really cheap, like, just include it in them
because it will look bad on you if someone
lands on their website or their socials and
their designs are messed up or the
logos cooked and, you know, because you didn't
give them guidelines to say, Hey, this is how
you use it, right? In terms of explaining
things clearly, I usually write little prompts or some blocks of text on the side saying
how to use this. Let's just say it's for a
pattern and I say, like, it's great for use
in backgrounds or used for visual interest. Make sure you don't know, put it over images or logos, depending on how, you know, depending on the
layout and stuff. So when it's a design tool, I'll be very specific on
how it should be used. And then I ask myself, can it be understood in one read or
people have to go over it? I clearly label things with little captions or
little side notes. Maybe, you know, you
need certain hex codes, I'll reference text
codes or angles like, you know, rotate the angle
or the angles, this. You know, you just
sort of make things simple, straightforward, easy to understand,
so someone can just easier design something using the assets you've given them. Next up, we're going
to be showing you how to package the files and how I do it and what you could use to deliver the brand
guidelines easily.
7. packaging & delivery for client: Now you finally created
your brand guidelines, you're ready to package it,
and send it to your client. So the format that
I do is I create a 16 by nine slide
deck in Illustrator. Sometimes people do
something like a 1080 by 13 50, so
it's not as long, but it's a bit, you know,
it's got the height, and it's more like blocky instead of, like,
landscape mode. Really up to you. I usually think of what size
their monitor is. Usually 1920 or 14 40 is typically the sizes
that people are using. You could do a big
four K resolution, but most of your
clients don't have a nice monitor, so
think about that. I'll save it as 16 by nine, and then I'll just
create some artboards. And then I typically
name them later on. I try and keep it neat
but that's what I do if you're going to create
it or I'd use a template. But I want to make sure
that it's easy to read and then I have to
download a massive file. And then what I do is also
create a one page style sheet. So for the smaller businesses, they light is because
it's easy to have a one page PDF or even just
a pingi image you can export Illustrator, and then that will be really easy
just to reference. Then what I like to
do is I like to use a folder structure template
where I put it in Dropbox. So you can see an example here. I give them the fonts, the logo, files, gives all the business cards,
social media patterns. And so these are
a real example of a few client projects that I've created, and you can
see how I lay it out. I use Logo Package Express
to export my logo files, and that really helps me to make the logo export
part really easy. And so just having that structure and
keeping things neat, will just show you professionalism and
just make everything. Then I upload
everything to Dropbox. Then what I do is I send
a final email mentioning, here's your files,
creating assignment, and I'm also asking for a Google Five Star
Google review as well. And then once that's done, I just check in with the client about two to three days later asking how are they
going with the files, if they need any help, if
they had any troubles. I also send them a final video on what's in the
folders and the file. I'll also show them how
to upload it to Canva. So I'll grab a PDF, drag it into Canva, and
I'll actually convert every in the guidelines. So I
think that's a great way. And a lot of the
smaller businesses do like this these days,
and that's why I do it. Just make sure that they
create a Bankit first and upload the fonts
that their brand fonts, and then tell them to
dragger up the PDF, which will help allow them
to start editing in Canva. So that's everything
about building a brand guideline
system. Hope you enjoy do leave a review if you enjoy this class and check
out the resource links. For your class projects,
I want you to create a brand guidelines using one of the tools or the templates
that I've provided, and use it for your own brand or maybe you're working
on a small client brand, practice it with that and create your first
brand guidelines, and I'll give you feedback as soon as possible.
Thanks so much for
