Graphic Design and Branding: Design a Cohesive Brand Guide with Confidence

1. Introduction: Hi, my name is Major League Mr. Hill, and I'm a self-taught graphic designer that specializes in web design and branding and marketing sales funnels. I run my creative studio full-time for my laptop while working with dream clients and the health wellness of Business and Entrepreneurship industry. In this class, I'll be covering everything you need to know about designing your own brand guide. This is applicable if you are designing your own personal brand as a freelancer or an entrepreneur, or if you are working with clients, you'll also get a behind the scenes look of my entire brand guide design process in Adobe InDesign, I used this process for all of my branding clients because I want you to get the exact step-by-step process down so you can finally create your own brand guide with confidence. I'm so excited to get started. 2. Class Project Overview: For your class project, you have two options. The first option is to design a brand guide for your own personal brand or a business that you want to create. This is the option that I will be teaching in this class. The second option is to design a brand guide for an existing brand that you've created in the past. This can be at brand assets from a past client on existing client, or even a brand assets that you've created in a different skill share class, or for a school project. I personally will be using Adobe InDesign to design my brand guide, but feel free to use any graphic design software of your choice once you complete all of the lessons in this class and finally, have a strong foundation of the entire graphic design process for creating a brand guide. I will go over the class project a bit more in depth while also giving you examples of some of the options that you can do for your class project. I'm so excited for you to dive into the content and get started. 3. What's in a Brand Guide: So what's an a brand guide? There are a number of different elements to include in a brand guide. And it can range from being extremely in-depth and b over a 100 pages long for bigger businesses and organizations. Or it can be clear, concise to the point and be less than 10 pages long for smaller businesses, or maybe businesses that are just starting off, what you choose to include in your brand guide essentially depends on two things. The price or clients pay and where they're at and business, bigger businesses typically have some sort of foundational representation of their brand. So if you're designing a brand guide for a bigger organization, you'll want to add things to a brand guide that helps elevate their existing business. Odds are they'll have a bigger budget to spend on things such as advertising and marketing. So inside this brand guide for bigger businesses, you may want to include things such as creative art direction, insight for their advertising touch points such as photography sheets or product packaging in a brand guide designed for smaller businesses, start-ups or maybe business owners that are just trying to get their feet off the ground. You want to sell the big picture. You want to help small business owners see the growth potential of their business and get them really excited for the feature. For example, if you're designing a brand and logo for a yoga teacher, inside of your brand guide, you can present mock-up examples of their logo on things such as yoga mats or athleisure or even a yoga studio sign. This also gives you the opportunity to upsell on other design services by showing your clients that there is more to a logo by placing a brand on products or even a store front mock-up. If you're just starting off in the industry, there is no harm to creating in-depth brand guides even for lower ticket clients. It's always good practice. It also helps you streamline your design process and allows you to build rapport with your clients. And also gives you a sense of how long it takes you to design and how much you should actually charge for your design services in the future if you do want to increase your prices in general, a brand guide should come at the end of a design project as a final handoff to your client, it should serve as an overview of the entire project and include all the things that were given to you in the client brief. This is by far one of my favorite parts of the process as a designer because it's where you can see all of the brand elements and how they come together in a single brand guide. You'll also be able to give your clients the tool set that they need to actually use their brand across all consumer touch points so that they succeed year after year for many years to come. Now there are a number of brand elements that can be found inside a brand guide. I will just be naming a few. This would be, I guess what I'd consider the foundation of a brand guide. But the more elaborate the brand is, the more in-depth your brand guide will be. So this is not everything. It is a starting point. So to start, the first thing is mission and vision statement. And mission statement is defined as a statement that communicates how an organization or business serves their customers. It's also a great foundation to help employees remain focused on the overall goal of the business. So you want to be able to communicate the brand's mission and vision statements. Where are there now, what their current mission is, and what their vision is for the world in the future and why they want to make an impact, why their business exists essentially, you want to make sure you include that at the beginning of the brand guide so that you can start to warm up your audience into, Wow, this is a really good idea and this mission is so important. So here are some examples from Nike and lululemon, but a mission and vision statement is definitely one of the essential bits in a brand guide. The next bit is a brand goal keywords, tone of voice. Now here are a few of the brand goal keywords and tone of voice examples from my own personal clients. So it can really range from what you're looking for. But essentially what you want to do is describe the overall mood of the brand and the overall goal of the brand so that your client knows how they want their audience to feel. Essentially, the main thing here is the connection your client wants to have with their audience. So the more in depth you explain that, the more valuable it is to your client. The next thing is a moodboard in inspiration, which essentially is just a collage and contains a variety of images that helps you define the brand that you've created to your client. They also can work as a guide in developing a brand projects such as a website or logo, and can also be the foundation of photography shoots necessary when your brand needs to create image collateral for advertising campaigns and marketing campaigns. This is a really good idea, especially if you're working with bigger businesses to help them visualize the brand mood that you want to capture. And this isn't just in the logo or just in the web design, but it can be used in imagery and photoshoot and videography. This essentially sets the foundation of the mood you've created as a designer, but also helps explain that to the client and your client feature business partners and team members. The next bit is all logo variations. Now here are a number of different logo variations from primary, secondary stamps, signatures, typeface's, everything you name it. You want to explain each logo variation if you have more than one and explain its use case when is a primary logo US versus when is a signature use. You know, you want to explain each logo, why you've created it, why it's personal to the brand, as well as where they can actually use it, maybe the signature marks and these standards are just used to add some flair to simple pages, but the primary logo, for example, is used across everything and is the primary brand elements that people recognize. The next thing is color pellets. And you want to give your clients the framework to actually use their color palette. And the most efficient way you'll want to make sure you have Haxe CMYK and RGB codes. And then you also want to provide them of when to use a primary color palettes and how to use their primary color palettes consistently across our website. On the left-hand side, the client I was working with had it both a primary and secondary color palette. So explaining the difference between primary and secondary color palettes and when to use a secondary color palette, you know, it all plays a role into a brand. So you want to explain that. So portray that these are the colors and this is how they're used together within the brand. The next thing is topography. As you know, if you're a designer, typography has a large influence on a brand's identity because it is an art form in itself, and it comes with predefined characteristics and moods and feelings. And you want to explain why you've chosen this typography for this particular brand. You want to one, explain the fonts and when to use them. If it's a sub-header or paragraph or signature or whatever, you want to explain what the type is and what paragraph style it sees four. But then on the left-hand side you can also see how the different types are actually used together. So that is really useful as well. The next thing is brand shapes and patterns. So on the left-hand side, shapes was the primary focus of this brand. It was very shape heavy from imagery to logos, to everything on the web site was very shaped driven. So we wanted to emphasize the use of shapes and how it essentially played into the brand. On the right-hand side, brand patterns is also something that a brand can be really known for. So say for bigger brands like Louis Vuitton, that LV brown print is something that they're really known for. So you want to also explain brand patterns. If the brand that you're working for has a brand pattern, then make sure you explain it and its use case and why it should be used and when it should be used. Imagery, animations and illustrations. Again, this helps your clients visualize for use of imagery, animations and illustrations across their website and why you chose these. Again, the entire brand guide is essentially to help sell the story behind the brand. So the more you explain your reasoning behind choosing particular illustrations or sourcing particular images, the better you become at telling the story and selling the story of the entire brand. And that is your job as a designer is to help bring a brand to life through imagery, through tax, through design, through creativity, and sell that story. So that is essentially what comes into a brand guide and imagery. Animations and illustrations all play a role into it as well. And it's really important to be covered in a brand guide. And one of the last things I'm going to be covering is brand mockups, signage and packaging. Now on the right-hand side, the mockups are sourced from Creative Market, so they're not mine. On the left-hand side is a website mock-up of a brand we created, but you want to sell the big picture. So say for example, you're just selling a logo or a brand identity and they don't necessarily have products yet, but later down the road, maybe 23 years on the road, that's where they want to go. You want to help them at visualize their future as a business too, the more you can use the brand identity and the logo on storefronts, on product packaging, on business cards, on websites, the more your clients get excited about the brand, because it isn't just this arbitrary symbol that you've made up. It is well thought out. It brings value to the direction they want to go as a business. And IT also creates a lot of meaning to them as well. That is essentially some of the elements that go into a brand guide. There are a number of different things you can add in as well. You can, you know, adding UI if you're doing a brand guide for an app, or you can expand even by sharing the founders story. A brand guide isn't restraints by any specific things, but the most important thing is having a structural foundation to start off with and then expand as you go. Basically, all of the things that I covered in this lesson is pretty much what I cover in most of my brand guides, and it is the structural foundation of everything I create. So I hope that helps and I'll see you guys in the next lesson. 4. Features that Make a Brand Guide Captivating: So now that we've covered the main features that actually go into a brand guide. Now I want to talk about how to actually design a brand guide that's actually captivating. The biggest thing when creating a brand guide is the fact that you want to sell the brand story not only to the business owner, but to their team, to their business partners, to their stakeholders, to the investors, and to their audience, whoever is going to be buying from them. You want to make sure that this brand guide speaks to the client's core values and everything that they stand for. And that is essentially how you make a brand guide captivating not only is it by selling the brand story, but it's also by making sure that there is a structural foundation to the entire design of the brand guy that makes the content in it easily digestible. So to start, I always think some sort of index system or filing method is really important in brand guides. On the left-hand side, you can see at the top above the line, there is a number index, and this is found on every single page in this brand guide. So that when clients or business partners or investors are flipping through the spring guide, they know exactly what section in the brand guide there in It's basically like a table of contents for this brand guide. It also helps your mind know where you are in the document and also helps you categorize where you're at in the document. On the right-hand side, you see that the four corners have its own unique element that is consistent throughout the entire document. So in the top left-hand corner you see mood board. But then as you flip through the pages as well, you then we'll be able to see that it's not just somebody board, there's logos as well, There's topography as well. So it is that sort of filing method or table of contents method that helps people read through the document, but also takes note of where they're at in the document. The next thing is actually explaining the logo design and symbolism. So if you've actually done the logo design than explaining how you got to be final mark in the final logo, then those are really useful. On the right-hand side, you'll also see exclusion zones which can be useful for particular brands. Not necessarily necessary for all brands, but can be useful to some, say, for example, you're not actually doing the logo design, but maybe you chose symbolism. You'll also want to explain why you chose particular icons or symbols, or illustrations or graphics, and why you source them. What do they actually bring to the brand? Why did you choose these to amplify the brand? So explaining the process you went through when actually creating the design and creating the final brand, all in all, help sell that brand story because it adds a unique touch to not just pictures, but it adds a story behind the image, the icon, the logo, the symbols and whatever it is you are trying to explain. So the more you explain the process behind creating a brand or creating some sort of symbol design, then the more valuable it is to your clients as well. The next thing is descriptive explanations on how to actually use each brand element and how they work together. So on the left-hand side, this is a mock-up that I created and it explains exactly what a business card is used for when it's applicable. On the right-hand side is the gene mummies brand mark and stab. And basically explains how this is a supportive element that helps identify the brand at once without attracting away from the primary logo. So making sure you provide some sort of explanation on how to use each brand element, where to use it and when to use it also adds value to your clients because they're not just trying to shoot in the dark with this brand that you've given them. They actually have the tool set and the directions that you provided them. These descriptive explanations throughout the brand guide. And the last thing I wanted to cover is consistency. Consistency, consistency. This is so critical, especially when it comes to brand guides, because that is the main purpose of a brand, right? Is to make sure that your RAM looks consistent across all consumer touch points. So it is critical to make sure that your brand guide is also consistent and on-brand so that your clients, when they receive them, they're like, oh my god, this is my brand. This is what we've created. This is what we've works him hard on. So maintaining consistency throughout the entire document is critical. As you can see, the cover pages in the main content pages all have the same table of contents sub header section. And then all the texts are align on the same spot, in the same area, in the same format across every single page to create that unique consistency across the entire document on this one as well, all of the text is aligned right? And then you have the four corners being the frame of the entire brand guide, whether it's on the cover page or the content page. So that again, helps create structure to the entire document. And this one, although there are colors everywhere, there's still consistency because this brand was very colorful, very playful, very fun. We wanted to make sure that the actual content pages were all different brand colors and the cover pages were actually had the unique shape and imagery as well. So it's actually opposite here. We made the main content pages all different secondary colors and the main cover pages, as you know, the clean primary color, if that makes sense. But again, it's consistent throughout the textile is consistent, the format, the outline, everything is on-brand and it makes sense for this brand. This wouldn't necessarily make sense for a brand that was going for a minimal vibe, you know, but it is fun. It is still consistent and it has that structural foundation of the tax being aligned in the same spot and then having the same shapes brought throughout the entire document as well. So those are some of the most important things when it comes to the structural foundation of a brand guide. And again, the biggest thing here is to have some sort of foundation and to be able to use it consistently throughout the entire document so that when someone actually receives it and when they read through it, it all makes sense to them. They're not trying to look for information somewhere on the page because it's in a different spot on each page. They actually know exactly where their IZ to go to read the explanation and to actually see the brand elements at USU. So hopefully that kind of explains how to make a brand guide captivating structural foundation and consistency is everything. And I cannot draw that down enough, but it is everything, especially when it comes to designing a brand guide, because you want to give your clients the tool set that they need to actually use their brand and succeed across all consumer touch points with the brand elements that you're giving them. So I hope that helps and I'll see you guys in the next lesson. 5. Where to Find Design Inspiration: So first I want to cover my favorite places to find inspiration for my brand guidelines and the outline and the foundational structure of my brand guides. Now, obviously at this point you've already created the brands. You shouldn't have some sort of idea of what you're looking for. So for me, I'm just going to look up maybe feminine brand guy, because the brand I'm designing this brand guide for is feminine. So you can have a look here and start to see different structures of content that you like. So I'm just gonna go ahead and start opening things in new tabs just so I could actually get a visual of what I like, what I don't like, and maybe get some ideas of things I maybe want to add as features into my brand guide. So basically this is the ideation phase to help create a strategy of what you want to do with your brand guide. So this is one brand guidelines style. Now there are a variety of different brand guides He can make and the design is pretty much up to you. So use this as inspiration and use it to fuel your creativity. When you're first starting off, it's good to replicate other brand guides out there just so you can kind of understand the structural foundation of what makes a brand guidelines Good and parallel and seamless and structural. But obviously when you are working with clients, you shouldn't copy other people's work. But when you're starting off, it is good to try to recreate. Things are already exists out there, just you could get practice. Here is another really neat a brand guide style. This is more feminine. I like the minimalism of it and the lines as well. And here is another brand guide style. I like the dark and moody. I like how all of these are on the left-hand side. So regardless, you have the page title, a subset, sub header, and a main description point. I love how everything is boxed in squares. It's very subtle, but you can see that there is a grid here as well, because even this text matches this text here, which matches this text here as well. So there are grids that are being followed, which I love. So go ahead and start finding content that you love. So I love Behance. I also really love dribble. If you aren't familiar with dribble, it's another really great place to find design. So you can go ahead and maybe search minimal brand guide. And then from there you can again start opening up other people's work to get inspiration. So I'm going to just go ahead and open it into new tabs. And you'll start to see that there is a lot of really talented designers out there that create really unique brand guides. In this class, I'll be mainly covering how to design a minimal brand guide just to make sure that you have the structural foundation to enhance your brand guides in the future. But it is also really fun to look at other people's work as well. I love all the colors here, but as you can see, there still is consistency with this outer edge and the header section. And then I also love this. I love the colors in the color usage wrap the entire thing. Um, it is very consistent. I love the box easiness of all the shapes and stuff. And then this one as well as really unique because it is more rounded, which I imagine is used throughout the brand and as well as in the app, because this is an app brand guide design. So again, make sure that you are doing your research and look for designers of brand guides that you admire and take bits and pieces of their work and implement it into your brand guide as we go through this class. And especially if you're starting off, it is really good to just recreate existing brands that you already like. But again, don't take that as your credit and your own work. It is just two. So you know, the entire process of setting up a brand guide and as well, pinterest is also a really great platform as well. You can look up brand guide, inspiration or whatever. You can use different keywords that are similar to what you want in your brand guide. And then you can again select and choose what things you like, what things you don't like. Here is a brand style guide with Spotify and here are different features that they include. Exclusion zones, for example. So you can go ahead and choose things that you like, things you don't like. Here's another one as well, with this fluid line, which is really unique as well, more so in the app world. But again, do your research, take note of what you like and what you don't like, and that is the best place to start. 6. Master Pages and Paragraph Styles: A brand guide is something that comes after you've already done the design work for the brand. So you'll want to have at least logos, colors and fonts, chosen. Other things like mockups, business cards, moodboards, whatever it is can be added into your brand guide as you go, which I'll show you when I actually start creating the brand guide. But you'll at least want to make sure you'd have colors, chosen, logos, or if you want to just follow along, then feel free to do that as a well, this essentially helps streamline the entire process so that you can create a brand guide. Efficient and effective way possible. But as you get more experience, creating a brand guide will become a faster and faster process. So this basically makes it easier for you, especially if you're just starting off that you can take things from this document and move it over to you, the brand guide document. So all of my brand collateral is in Illustrator, but I like to design my brand guides in InDesign. So I'm just gonna go ahead and open InDesign. Now that InDesign is open, you'll want to click Create New, and I go over to print, click view all presets and then click a4. A4 is one of the most popular printing type. So I just like to use this Presets and you can then change the name to whatever you want it to be so easily, the steel brand guide. And then I keep the width high-end units the same. I typically change the orientation to landscape because I like how much space landscape view gives me hovering. You can choose to do vertical or landscape. I've done both, but I prefer doing landscape. Then you'll want to uncheck Facing Pages. Facing pages is only useful if you are designing a book. Back kind of opens up in the middle because this is typically is just a PDF or something that clients want to print, then you just want to make it so that it's not back-to-back. And then you can go ahead and go down to margins. I typically keep things as is, you can feel free to change the margins. You could also change this later on. And then from there we go ahead and click Create. So now that we have the InDesign document open, the first thing you'll want to start doing is creating a master pages. So master pages can be found if you click Pages over here and then click A-Master. So this essentially is a theme master, I guess a template of your entire document. So this helps maintain consistency and cohesiveness across entire brand guide. Also, this allows you to make changes at the mass level. So if you make sure you set up your document in the correct way, then you can make massive changes. You can change fonts, you can change colors, you can change pretty much anything if you have a master for it. So it is useful, especially what's your brand guide gets very, very, very, very big. And you want to make changes to a 100 page document and then making sure you're using master pages is so, so, so important. So I'm going to start off by creating my first master, which I'm personally going to use as my main content page layout. So if I double-click A-Master, that means that it should be chosen and clicked on. And the first thing I'm going to start off by doing is creating the guides and grids that will essentially serve rulers of the entire design just to make things easier for us, I'm going to expand this a little bit so that we can kind of see the full view here. And I'm going to leave it a little bit smaller so that I can click to Illustrator. And I need to put your go up here to layout and click Create Guides. From here, you can then play around with how many rows and how many columns you have. I'm going to click 68 and see what that looks like. And then let's see actually quite like that. Rtd Maybe I'll go up to eight here. Yeah, actually quite. What about six? No, gates better. And we took so I'll do 88. Now this doesn't have to be an even number. I mean, you can choose whatever guides you like. I typically like to make them even numbers. So sometimes you'll have six rows and columns or vice versa. And then kind of play around with this. This can always change it later on, but it's good to kind of see something that you like and start to imagine the designs that you can have whisk grids. So I always make sure the guides fits the margins. Otherwise, if you get to page, then it's the dimensions of entire page as opposed to the margin. I typically like to do margins. I'm gonna go ahead and click, Okay, and now if you click W on Mac, you can then turn on and off the guides. So as you're designing, you can use a guide design and then kind of see the design that you're making without the guides there, which is super, super useful. So w allows you to change your view. So first things first, I'm gonna go ahead and create the sub header of the page. So I'm gonna go ahead and click W and make sure that my guides are back on and just draw a line across here. Now if I click Shift, it will make sure that the line is straight, which is super useful. So I will just draw a line up until that point and then increase the color. The stroke 21, that then creates a line for us, but it is a bit too sick my liking. So I'm gonna change this to you. You'd be pointing to. So this is just a line, I'll sleep, but then you can start to choose what you actually want to deal with the layout of your page. So sometimes I like to go out of my margins to play around with things. Let's see here. Yeah, So I actually quite like that there. I'm going to add a text block now and then dry it in over here. And then I'll start typing what this document is. So I'll click Delete vestibular branch and then I will make it smaller so can see it. And you want to make sees subheaders really subtle because you don't want to distract your reader away from the main content that's going to go here. So Jacque was steel brand guy. And when I increase the spacing to maybe a 100, maybe 200. And I actually think I will move this over to the right-hand side because I'd seen their preferred there. I actually don't like the Cera fonts, so I'm gonna go ahead and change the font. Look fun, do I like here? And I'm going to increase or decrease the spacing a bit. So I like that there. And then I will copy that could w, so I can see my guides again and not line up. And you can see that the green grids kinda snapping into place, put that directly across it at their parallel. And then for now, I'm just going to type this in as page title. Because this is a master page, you'll actually be able to pull specific content from here and change them individually on a page. This typically allows you to kind of maintain the consistency across your document so that, you know a page title is in the exact same place every time you flip through each page. So for now I'm just going to get the page title there. And then I'm going to copy this again. Take this down to the bottom. And then I'll erase that. And right-click and click insert special character, go to markers and then click crunch page numbers. So that will change based on what page you are since we are on a master of justice a for now, but that's totally fine. Pool. So that is looking good so far. I actually think because this is kind of, there's three corners. I actually want to move the brand name, which is over here, and move this over to the bottom. So I'm going to turn on guides again just a little bit so that I can see and then type in the brand name. Sorry, I accidentally typed in lowercase. So what I can do is actually click it and then go under here and click all caps button. And then it will automatically change it's all caps. So that makes the design a bit more square, which I am really starting to like. And then what I want to do is then it creates the content that would go in. So something that typically I like to do with my brand guides and especially with on content pages. I'd like to add a and a description of to use a particular thing. So I'm going to click W again, draw a text box here. And I want to in the center of the page. And then I will right-click and then fill with placeholder text. Then I want to actually start making it look like a real paragraph just so I could get a real visual. So let's see. I will just add in some spacing in the middle so that I can start to see what texts might look like if I were to add it in later on. So that's there. And obviously this is just a font that I randomly is the start font. So I'm going to actually use the same font that I used for the subhead, but make it a little larger. So I'm going to choose the seat at Grand again. And then I look, she's regular, didn't actually make it center. So it actually turns out this is a really thick font even though it's light. So I'm going to change this completely and tried to choose a font that kind of matches with the brand. And go ahead and type in Proxima Nova, because I know that's like just a very clean, simple font. I am actually going to increase the spacing a little bit just to add some space there and then also increase this letter spacing as well. So I'm going to change up to 50 to see what it looks like. At least 30 K that's starting to look cohesive. And another section up here, erase all this and then click page title. I'm going to make that bold and maybe underlying it, increase the spacing of it and now are starting to see some consistency throughout here. I'm just going to go ahead and line this up to the grid. In. This can change as we go along. Serves as the outer template, and then you'll be able to pull this in two different content on your page. So now that we have the majority of the content that we want on our primary content page completed. We want to make sure we save each type of texts as a paragraph style so we can then pull them across pages and also make changes at scale. So you'll want to make sure texts that are the same are defined as one paragraph style so you can keep it consistent across the entire page. So to start, I'm gonna go ahead and click this brand guide text up here. And then I'm going to hold Shift and then click this page number placeholder here. As you can see, it's like them both. What you'll then want to do is go over here to texts style and make sure you click this plus button, which allows you to create a new paragraph style. So go ahead and click that, and then it will come up with this thing, paragraph style to highlighted in blue. You could go ahead and name it whatever you want. But you want to make sure that the organization makes sense in your mind. So I'm gonna go ahead and click this as sub-header aligned, right? This needs to be different than the subheaders on this part because these are aligned left. So it does make a difference. Now that that saved, you'll just go ahead, click Enter and then it should save automatically. And then you'll want to go ahead and do the same thing with these page titles over here as well. Seo click the plus button, click Create New, and then name it. Subheaders aligned left. As you can see, you can then choose between these. If you were to click sub-header line right, you'll see that it will automatically change from align left, align right. So then you make sure you want to click aligned left to the side. And as you can see, you can see that this text down here is actually lowercase. So I want to make sure my subheaders are always capital letters, regardless if I accidentally typed in lowercase. So what I want to do is click that again and click the top again and then make sure to click all caps. And then what you want to do is then click this button to redefine the style so that it is carried across the entire thing. And just to make sure I'll go ahead and do the same thing with these ones on the right-hand side. Make sure it's in all caps, and then redefine the style as well. So now we have both of our sub-header is defined, and now we'll want to define our page title, page style. So bit of a tongue twister. So you'll go over here, do the same thing. And then it click New paragraph style and click page title. And again, what you'll want to do, you'll want to make sure everything is the same. So because I like this in all caps, I want to make sure that I click all caps as well so that when you make changes at sale, everything is the same and there's no inconsistencies throughout the entire document. So click all caps and then you'll need to redefine that style again. And it actually seems like the tax name wasn't actually saved. So you'll just need to go here, click the pencil, and then you can name it as page title. And go ahead and click. Okay, so now that is saved as our page title as you can see. And then you'll want to do the same thing with the body texts as well. So go ahead and click Create New, and you can name it paragraph style or body texts or whatever you want it. So I'm going to just name it main content, paragraph style. Again, you just want this to make sense in your mind. So you can name these whatever you want as long as it makes sense to you. So now that we've finished designing the main content page, we can then move on to designing the main cover page. So I'm just gonna go ahead and click A-Master, right-click and then click duplicate master spread a. So as you can see, it creates now a beam master and it's exactly the same as the page we just made. But instead what we want to do is now differentiate this because I'm going to use this as my primary cover page. But I still want to maintain the same consistencies across the documents with minor changes. So this the subheaders in this line and this grid that I've created will be carried across the entire document to kind of make sure that everything is maintain and has the same structural foundation. That is one of the most important things when it comes to design, is having a strong structural foundations. If I click w, everything is the same. So instead what I'm gonna do because I don't need it, this body text, I'm just going to go ahead and click Delete. And what I then want to do is actually create a rectangle because I want to add some color into my document. So I'll go ahead and add that rectangle. Go ahead and click Properties. And I've just realize I haven't added in my brand colors yet. So now is a good time to do that. So I'm going to go ahead and go to my plan assets and illustrator. And I already have my color palette housing here. So I'm just going to go ahead and click it. Click copy. And then I'll go back to my Adobe InDesign file, click paste, and I'll just click w so I can see the whole thing. I'll go back to the selection tool and I'll shrink it down here so that it's much smaller. What you'll then need to do is rotate it. If you click shift at, then rotates in perfect 45 or 90 degree angles. So that is super useful. And I will just add that here. So now that we have the color palette copied onto here, all you'll need to do is go to this little button and click this folder button. Can then name the color group, whatever we want. So maybe Angelie, AB Fran, brand colors. And click, Okay, so now that you see that those are plugged in, we now have that in a folder which is really useful so that we can easily add colors as we go. So I'm going to go ahead and highlight that rectangle that I made before. And what I'll want to do is fill it with some color. So I'm going to maybe do you coral color, maybe yellow, blue, things like coral. And so now obviously all of the texts that was on this is behind the shapes. So what you'll want to do is click Command and the left square bracket, which brings things the bad. Alternatively, what you can do as well is click Arrange and click Send to Back. And now as you can see, we have black tax on this coral color, which doesn't make sense. So I am going to change text to white. And I'll use the brand color that is here as well. Now, as you can see, this is a new sub header style, although it's the same as it in black, since it is why it is considered a new paragraph style. So you'll want to redefine this as its own textile as well. So click New paragraph style and you can click sub-header aligned right whites. And then you can just click this and then redefine the style just by clicking that and then clicking this. And as you can see, it automatically changes to white as well. And you want to do the same thing here. You'll just change the font color to this white color. And again, you'll want to redefine this as a new paragraph style and clinics sub header, lines left white. And then you'll need to click this bottom corner sub-header as well. And then just go ahead and click the style. And as you can see, it makes it super easy to make changes at scale. Also go ahead and change the stroke of this line to that white color as well. And then I will change this text to white as well. And then what I'm going to go ahead and do is move this to the center. Now, if this these grids aren't showing up on your document, that's totally okay. You can go up here to View Grids and Guides and you can make sure Smart Guides, snap to guides and grids are here if you need more precise snus when you're moving something and you don't want something snapping to guide, you can always uncheck this. These are the shortcuts here as well if you need them. Alternatively, another really good thing to help sanitize your tax or objects or whatever it is you're creating is by scrolling down and going to align. And you'll want to click this down arrow and make sure things are aligned to the page. And then you can just click align horizontal centers, align vertical centers. And then obviously this is aligned left, so you'll just click Align Center as well here. And because this is a cover page, I do want to make this tax much bigger. So I'm just gonna go ahead and double-click it and increase the text size. Maybe to 20. And then just so that you have space in case we have longer page titles later. I'll just go ahead and expand that, centralize it again. And then I think like all of that. So then what I then need to do as well is a defined this as its own style as well. So have new paragraph style and then click cover, page title. So now that we've defined all your paragraphs styles have designed your master pages. I want show you how powerful having master pages is. So say I want to pull a master page into the primary document. All you'll need to do is drag and drop. So right now, page 1 automatically has a master applied to it. But say I want to override it with the B master. So I'm gonna go ahead and move that into here. And then we can start to make the outline of her document just by dragging and dropping these master pages in so that you can start to see what the brand guide can possibly look like. So, you know, if you can imagine, you can have your work a logos cover page had her primary, secondary logo, it's tucked SRA. Maybe talk about typography or your header fonts, paragraph font, and you see the consistency across the entire thing. Now, a few say for example, you want to then bring this to the first page. All you need to do is click Command Shift and then click and then it automatically allows you to make edits to the original master page without affecting the master page. And say you want to type something in here. Love the love of law, and say maybe you decide you don't actually like this paragraph on. You can then go ahead and click properties here. Go ahead and make changes. Maybe you want it bold perhaps, or you want it bigger. You can then click redefined style. And as you can see up here, it automatically make some changes to even the paragraph style of the main content on all the other pages, even though it's Master page. So as you can see, it can be super useful, especially, say at the end of the entire design projects, you want to change your fonts. You don't want to do it page by page and making sure that you have these paragraph styles defined from the get-go is super, super, super important. So I'll just go ahead and click Command Z to undo all of that. I just wanted to quickly show you the power of master pages and making sure that, you know, you have your paragraph styles defines in the beginning and why it's so critical. 7. Brand Guide Design Process: Now if you click on any of the master page things, you can't move it because it's part of the master page. But what you can actually do is bring things up from the master page on to the specific content page and then customize it. If you click Command Shift on Mac and then click the title, you'll start to see that you can actually bring this title to the current page and then actually make changes to the title, which is super useful, but also make sure you have consistency across the page. Same thing here right now, I can't click it or select it. But if I click Command and Shift, then I can then change this as well and make sure that says logos as well. Well. So then as we start to go through, you'll start to be able to add in things as we go. But for now, I'm just going to start creating the outline of the page. So the next thing that would probably be colors. I'm just going to adding all the cover pages now so that I can continue to create this outline, colors and then typography. So logos, color, typography, mockups. And I'm actually going to bring this page up to the front and cite it up there and actually make this one say brand. So this is basically everything that has to do with brand mission, vision, whatever you want to add. So now I have my cover pages added. I have brand logos, colors, typography, and mock-ups. That is kind of the outline of my document per se. And then now I actually get to add in the content and what I actually want that to look like. So I'm going to start off in the brand section. So again, a similar type of thing. You just drag and drop things from the master pages and then add them into this outline that you're slowly starting to create. So first things first, I'm actually going to do mission statement. And I actually now that I look at it, don't think I like this underlines, so I'm just going to click Command Z to undo it so that I can't select it again and then go back to the master so that I can make the change at scale. So then I will undo the underlying, see what that looks like. Move this up a notch so that we can kind of see it looks psych, little bit more. I think the line height is a bit too much. Okay. So now that I made that change on the master page, I'm going to go back to Pages and then go back to the section after brand. That's looking a bit better. So I'm going to click Command Shift to bring that to the current page and then type in mission statements. And then typically here I like to add in a short description on what this means to the clients, but to make things easier, I like to do everything in bulk. So first, I want to create the outline of the entire document without actually adding in content or customizing content. Because again, I want this to be done in the most efficient way possible. I want to add brand keywords. And I also want grand goal. I may even want to add board as well. And again, what we're doing now is creating the outline of the documents. And now we have the mission statement, brand keywords, brand goal, and then meet board. And then I'll just keep that at that for now. If I once add things in later than I can, again, I'm just focusing on the outline and now so for logos, I want to have primary logo. Secondary logo. Add in another page below that brand stamp. Another page. Save it. Let me see what other assets I have in terms of logos. So those are standard Sukarno scam, right? That's good for now, depending on the logos that use created and the brand that you've created, all of the content that you add into your brand guide can change. I am doing this based on my personal brand. So I want to make sure that I am including everything that makes sense for my brand. If you are working with, you know, a corporate company, they might have different needs than a personal brand. So you want to make sure you're adding things only if they're relevant to the brand you're creating this brand guide for. So that makes sense. So then going into colors, I'm just going to, this changes two primary colors. You could also add in a secondary color palette if you have one, since I don't, I'm just going to delete that spread and go to typography and type in header font paragraphs. So that's colors, typography. And then we have mockups. So here you'll want to mock up anything that's relevant. Again, if you're just doing brand identity, this is a really good place. Actually upsell other services you might offer as a designer. Someone comes to you just for a logo design. You can then mock-up maybe a website or product packaging or a storefront labels, whatever it is, tagged shopping bags. You wanted to mark things up so that you could possibly upsell other avenues of what a client might want from you. So this one I'm going to add in a website and then add another page that says business card. And we'll show you how to get all of these done. So now that we have the layout of the page as we go through this, you'll start to see brand mission statement, brand keywords, bread, goal, mood, board, logos, primary logo, secondary logo. Brands damn, favicon, colors, primary colors, typography, header, paragraph, mockups, website, and business card. You can continue to add things as you go, or you tend to just keep things as is right here. So going back to the top, I'm going to start with the easiest section first, just since I already have all of the logos completed, I'm going to go ahead and start adding in the content from this primary page on my brand collateral page and moving it over to this section here, there is a PNG of it. And I will drag and drop that into the documents. And then I will make it a little bit smaller by clicking Command Shift so that it shrinks everything to scale. Okay, cool. So now that's on the page. I once a place this somewhere that makes sense for this logo to be. So what I'm actually going to do is I want to centralize this on the other half of the page. I'm actually going to draw a square. I want it to be a perfect square as well just to maintain that cohesion across line up the square, community outer bounds. And now you'll only see this square from the guide's section because there is no no fill or no color by if he highlighted, ie can then be able to see it. So I want to center this logo in the middle of this square. So what you'll want to do is highlight both of the sayings. Click Align to Selection. And then you can centralize this with the central buttons over here. Cool, So that is that. And then, and then just copy these just so that we can maintain that. Look, if you click Command Shift Option B, it will actually paste that in the exact same place as opposed to if he just click Command E, it will paste it wherever it wants to. So I like to click Command Shift Option on Mac to make sure that it copies and pastes in the exact same spot. And then same thing. I am going to adding secondary logo PNG file into that square. And then from there, you can either fit this to the grids by that, or you can click Fit, fit frame proportionally and it should centralize it for you. So then same thing, I'm going to click Command Shift to make it smaller. And I actually want to be adding two of these in the same exact spot. So since I have multiple different colors in my brand, this maybe useful. So I'm going to drag and drop this blue one. And actually now that I'm here, I actually may want to add a third one. I'm going to click Command Shift again. And then duplicate this again. Move it over so that it's in the others. Then go back to my Finder. And I will drag and drop the yellow one over here as well. Cool. So obviously those are not in line. So what I'll do then is highlight them all. Go back to here and make sure I click Align to Selection. So I want to align vertical centers so that makes them all in line. And then I also want to distribute the objects evenly across this entire space. So under distribute objects, you can click this and then it automatically centralizes this. I then book group this by clicking command group, click W to highlight this with the square. And then centralize that again within the square. Cool. So that is some secondary logo examples. And the more you can kinda showcase the brand throughout the brand guide, the better it is and the more useful it is as well. So that is the primary logo and secondary logo. And then I want to add in the brand stamp and news the brand stamp over from my files. Paste that in here, click Command Shift and shrink it down to a size that And then again, going back up here, I want to highlight this invisible square. Go back down here, click Command Shift Option B, and then it will paste it in the same exact spot and then same thing, align things to the center. Now, there are a few different ways you can align things. And I typically like to align my logos more specifically to the center of the page. However, you can also align it just to the left-hand side, if you like. I personally prefer centralizing my logos just because there's so much empty space that I want to fill up with he now the content. So I typically like to centralize my logo, but then if it is text-heavy, I will align it to the grid a bit more like you'll start to see later on. So that is the brand stamp. And then going on to the favicon is obviously is just the thing that goes on your website. And then I will go ahead and go to section as well. And this is at the favicon. And we'll take this same square from the top. Command Shift Option B, a bit smaller, and then centralize this as well. Cool. So now I have my logos inputted into the brand guide. And now we can move on over to colors. So it my initial document, as you can see, I already have my colors here. So I'm actually going to just copy and paste directly from here. Or what I can do is actually based on what I want my grids to look like. So I'm going to draw a square. And I will make it maybe all the way down to the bottom. And I'm going to start in putting colors based on the document that I have. So it is 400, copy and paste and copy them and geese together. And I will make sure that they're aligned vertically and then I'll also distributed evenly. And then since I've selected them all, I can then move them based on what I think makes the most sense. So I actually quite like it within the bounds of the grids. So I'm going to go ahead and custom adjust each of these squares to match up with the grid. So then you can see the outline of each thing really show up in the overall design. Now fancy mouth. You can start to see the colors. So now I'm going to fill it with other colors in the document. So those are the primary colors. Going on to the next section, typography. I'm going to skip typography for now. Now going into the mockups. First, I'm going to design a square here that I can just move over the website design directly from my files into this document. Drag and drop this screenshot of my website mockup into the file. And you'll see that it actually populates into that square. And what you can do is then click Fit and then fit frame proportionally and it should auto adjusts for you. So I'm going to move this down a bit so we can see the actual website that's customized. Then what I want to do now is actually a line this up With the top. I don't actually like this black line here, so I'm going to just crop it out of the way. This up again to the top of this square. Drag this down because I liked the look of it hanging over the edge. Actually, since its way, it doesn't really going to shrink this down a little bit. So I can see a little bit more of the website design. Go to that section there. Pretty much line at the bottom. That is what that looks like. I think I'm going to add an outer stroke to make things look a bit here. And you can make it smaller, pointed. Cool. I like the look of that. Wanted to add a drop shadow so I can actually see what it looks like a little bit more. Make the opacity 20 percent shot looks like preview, so that distance is a bit off. A little bit cool. So I'll click Okay and see what that looks like. And I do like that drop shadow actually a lot. And then what I'm actually going to do is go back up here to the logo section and highlight that square that I was making sure everything was in the center. And do the same thing here. Command Shift V, and then I want to align, make sure it's aligned to selection and centralize the two. Cool spot is starting to look really, really nice. And I'm, I'm really happy with how it's starting to look. And then same thing I'm going to copy this man shifted down to the business card section, then go back to my folder and make sure that I can add in my business card mock-up here as well, meaning go over here to my business card mockup, drag and drop it into the selection. And there it is. Now, I'm going to undo the SRO minus square up to this section here. And similar saying, I'm just going to centralize it from here. Turn it simply. I think she want to make this match this square because I actually kind of likes things bleeding off the page. And then if I click, right-click and then fit frame proportionally, it should adjust based on what you selected. So I could either keep it like that or I can make it expand beyond the grid. Which sometimes is fun, not necessarily necessary, but sometimes it's fun. So I'm going to bring this brand guide selection here to the front as well as this page number by clicking Command Shift and then click. And then I'm actually going to expand the bounds of this bit more to the edge of the page just to see what it would look like if this actually does beat off the page a little bit. So I will go ahead and click Fit frame proportionately again. Span this little bit so we can see the design a bit more, actually quite like the look of that. So I'm actually going to bring this back so that these come to the front. And then I'm also going to bring this line to the front a little bit so that I can adjust this and make it look a little bit more like it makes sense. It's going to drag this. So I actually really loved that and how that looks cool. So now I have most of my content and imagery actually in the brand guide. So now that most of the imagery is n, I'm actually going to scroll back up to the sections that have text. So now I am just going to pick w so I can see my grids again and go to the textbox tool and drag and drop something here. So then you'll want to type something that makes sense to be a header. So if you go over here, you'll start to see a mock-ups of texts that I've written there so much more to a brand and the way it looks. So I'm just going to type that for now. And then I will actually want to go ahead and choose a font that I want to end for more Int and then increase the text size. Or you can type something like this is an example of what your header text should look like. And then you'll want to make sure that these are all written out here and where you need it. So I'm just gonna go ahead and click enter and click HRM warrant care amount. Reduce the size here a little bit. And we can actually change this to be similar but different. And I actually think it should go at the top. And I'm going to copy and paste this same thing and go down to the paragraph section, it command Shift Option paste. And then I will actually do the same thing for the body text. So my body text is actually Proxima Nova. And then I want to decrease the size to make it a bit more accurate to what paragraph typography might look like. Copy and paste. Could even remove this and adding filler text to make it a bit more believable. Then again, you want to change this to font crux in Mendoza. Regular. Actually going to add in a bit of spacing here. Cool. Now if I click w, This actually isn't in line, so I'm going to move that sounds. Make sure it's in line with the grid. Same with this one. Move it down so that it is in line with the grid. That looks good now. Cool. Now we have our paragraph font and our header font. And I'm actually going to copy this again and take it all the way up to mission statement. Line this up. So I've already written my mission statement, but again, this brand guide is supposed to give your clients that tool set they need to succeed and making sure that they know what their mission. And it is their brand goals are, is all plays a role into being able to use their brand in the most effective way possible for many years to come. So I've already written all of this, so I'm going to go ahead and go to my website and copy and paste things from my mission statement, brand keywords, brand goal into this document and now fast forward it so you don't need to follow along as I'm typing, you can kinda see what that process looks like. Hi. Hi. Okay, so now I've finished my mission statement, my brand keywords, and my brand goal. This is pretty much copied and pasted directly from my website since I've already created my website. And then I'll actually want to go into my mood board. So what I will want to do first is actually create the layout for what I want my mood board to look like. So I'm going to go ahead and click Shift. I want to make perfect squares. So I'm gonna go ahead and click Shift to make that perfect square. And then align this. I now want to move this actually over all the way to the right-hand side. Actually, no, I'm going to keep it over to the left. Copy and paste, move it down a bit to hear. Spot is going to be the outline of my mood board. I guess I'm going to actually try to make it a bit more horizontal, so I've done that. Then I also want to distribute them horizontally in the same manner. So I'm going to go ahead do that. I've already created a mood board for my brand, but I'll want to go ahead and go to my Pinterest board that I've created a while ago before I even made my logo and pull ideas from there. So if I do hand off my brand and the future, basically my team or partners or clients or whoever is working with my brand. Epoch given moment knows the mood that I want to create when creating any other brand collateral or anything useful to the brand. So I'm gonna go ahead and go to Pinterest as well as go to my Instagram. And then basically what I'll do is save pictures directly from my Instagrams, my Pinterest, and add them into my mood board so that in the future, people can easily get a feel of what I actually want my website to look like. So I'm gonna go to Pinterest, go to my primary Pinterest board, saved pick Angelica steel brand in my brand is definitely inspired by coral beach themes, neutral colors. And in general, that's kind of the vibe that I'm going for whenever I create something. So I'm gonna go ahead and right-click this image. For now. I'm just going to save to my desktop. Now I have a mood board. So now I have a mission statement, brand keywords, brand goal, mood board, Logos, primary, secondary brand stamp. See the con, colors, typography, and mock-ups. So next thing now that we have all the content added in, you'll then want to add in short descriptions of what each thing is and how your clients will use them. So you can research why a mission statement would be beneficial to your client. But because I've done this for so long, I'm just going to go ahead and type in my own disruptions. Now that, you know, you don't have to watch me type 2. Okay, great. Now that we've finished all of them on each of the pages, now we will finally make the final tweaks. So again, I have a page title section from the master. And what I want to do is actually put this tax to the page that we're on. So then I can then change and say what section we're in. So I'm going to just copy this and say brand, brand. And then this one says logos. So I'm gonna go ahead and do the same thing here. Logos. Great. So now we've added that. What I'll need to do next is actually added in the hex codes and all the details for all of these colors. So I'm gonna go ahead and do that now. Let's go ahead and centralize it. Then what I'll do this here, whites will copy, paste. And then what I'll do to make things easier is actually go into Illustrator and open up the actual color property so that I can easily follow along with what color I'm actually doing. Otherwise, you have to opening close. Everything we will do now is actually make sure that everything is capital letters. Cmyk is 1553, 56 One. And for naming my colors, I like to go to coolers, dot-com. And then you could actually put in the hex code directly there. And then it comes up with creative names. Sometimes they're really good, sometimes I don't really like them and kind of make up my own color name. That sounds good. Now, I'll maybe do Cooper. I'll actually go ahead and change this to bold so that it has a bit of differentiation. And then the same thing will happen here. I'll go ahead and open Illustrator, open this yellow color and paste the hex code. Now continue to do that with every single section that I need to for this primary color section. Hi. Okay, great. So now we have the color swatch finish. And then last but not least, we'll want to add a table of contents and then a cover and closing page. So what I'm gonna do now is add a table of contents page before the first page. And then I'm actually going to add a blank page so that I can custom create this cover page based on what I essentially want it to look like. So what I'm actually going to do is do an outer box that is this yellow color. And do an inner box that is just paper white or even the off-white color. Beautiful. I'm gonna go ahead and add in my primary logo to go ahead and take that from one of the login pages, copy it, and then click Paste. Go ahead and center this to the page. What I then want to do is add some features that allow me to describe what is going to be inside of this document. So I'm just gonna go ahead and take one of the subheaders, make it possibly blue, and say brand guidelines. So I'm going to actually make this a bit bigger since this is the cover page. And bring it in from there. To spice things up a little bit, I'm actually going to add in primary slogan. And I will actually centered vertically matched page. Same thing on the other side. I don't know. Finding them with the sign and then aligned to the center of the page. But see how that looks like. I actually think this is a bit too long the text, so I'm going to change it a bit to make it a bit smaller so it looks a bit more uniform. And I'm going to change this as well. So I'm liking the look of that as well. Your cover page can essentially be anything. I like to make it look different than my other cover pages. Just to make things a little bit different. And I'm actually going to duplicate this spread and use it as a closing page as well. So I will delete all of this actually, stead, I will go ahead and grab the primary stamp and take this, bring it down here, paste it down, and put it right here. In the center. We've got bit smaller. Centralize it. Perfect. That is then the closing page. And then last but not least, we have the table of contents. So I'm gonna go ahead and name this table of contents. And then you'll want to describe what can be found in each of the pages. So to keep things uniform, I like to keep it says same layout but change it up just a little bit. So your table of contents should serve as an introduction to the entire document. So in this description, you'll want to actually explain what this brand guide is used for and how your client can actually use this to their advantage. So I'm just going to write a short snippet into what someone can find in brand guide and why he's fall for the person who's reading it is the introduction. And what we'll do now is actually make the table of contents. Hey, now you have it. That is my entire brand guide and my entire brand guide method. I will share this entire brand guide with you guys in the class projects section for you to take a look at. But essentially that is my entire process for creating a brand guide. I like to streamline processes, so I like to do things one at a time. I first start off with the outline, go into adding creatives, then adding in any texts specific things, then going into the descriptions, then formatting it the cover page, table of contents and closing page. And that is it just about it. 8. Final Edits & Showcasing Your Work: Now that we've finished the design of our brand guide, you'll want to go through the document one last time to make any final changes. So this refers to proofreading all of the texts that you've written, as well as making sure all of your grades are in place. And if you see something now that you've had some time away from the brand guide if you want to make any design changes. So as I go through, I'm now looking at this and I'm thinking this text is way too big, so I'm just going to go ahead and go to Properties and make it a bit smaller because I think it is too large, especially for a document like this. Let's see. I think 13 is okay. But I think the texts heights too high, so I'm just going to go ahead and change that maybe to 20. Gonna go ahead actually and copy this and then put it in a new text box so I can adjust it a little bit better. Okay, cool. So I like that better. That looks a lot more in line. And then I'm going to keep going down. I'm gonna do the same thing to this one. So I'm just gonna go ahead and copy this up here. And then click Command Option Z. Grab the text from the back. Paste that there. Then I will continue to scroll, see if there are any other final changes that I want to make. So this is really intense. I don't like the old caps vibe. So I am just going to actually go up here and grab one of the headers just to make things more uniform, especially when you are designing things very quickly, it can be easy to skip over some things. But once you start doing it more often, you'll start getting into a rhythm of designs that you like. And you'll also have an eye for things like this. So I'm gonna go ahead and paste this here. And I also want to make sure that this text is the same thing here. So I'm just going to go ahead and again pull the texts from the back and then paste it into here. Then this is also silvery bags. So I'm just gonna go ahead, make this smaller, gonna go back up here and define this as a paragraph style. So I will define this as paragraph style for content. All right, We'll go ahead and go back down again and change this paragraph style. That same text. That looks good. And then, yeah, There you have it. So now that I have made any final design changes to my documents, I then we'll go up to export it. So all you need to do is click File Export. And I'm already in the Angelie with steel Dropbox folder that I've already created. So I typically like to create a new folder and then maybe name at brand guide. And then you have a few different options here. So I typically like to export one as a PDF. So I'll export one as a PDF, save that. And then you can pretty much leave all of these as is if you do have hyperlinks. Sometimes people like to include a hyperlink to maybe a contact form or an email, make sure you check this. But because this brand guide specifically doesn't have any hyperlinks, then we don't meet that. So I will make sure to export this as a PDF. You don't really need to change anything else. So export. And you'll see this blue bar loading up here. So once that is finished, then that means the guide is export it properly. And then what I also like to do is X4 as jpegs, that is makes sure that I have actual individual images of all of the different files. So I'm just gonna go ahead and click JPEG, click Save. And I want all pages. And then again, I will export it. Awesome. Now that that is finished, I will go ahead and go to my Finder. Now within my brand guide folder, I have the PDF, which you can then see here. And we can go through each of the pages just to make sure everything looks good before we actually send this off to a client, so everything looks good and I'm happy with that. I typically just sum the PDF and then you just send an email and basically introduced with the brand guide is or you can even jump on a call with their clients. And then I also like to export the JPEG. So this is individual images of each page of the brand guide. And the reason why I like. Export jpegs of a brand guide is to design some sort of image or mock-up of my entire brand guide collectively. So what I like to do with these images is actually then create a file that is ready to export and upload to things like Behance, dribbble or Instagram or even Pinterest. So since I've taught you how to design an InDesign, I will show you how to create a brand guide overview in InDesign as well. So I'm just going to go ahead and click Create New. And you can go ahead and click Create new document. And I will actually choose pixels, and then I will choose 1080. By 1080, I will name this brands tried overview. Go ahead and click Create. Now you can go ahead and create this in Canvas, Illustrator, Photoshop, whatever you feel comfortable with. But because I've already showed you how to design a brand guide in InDesign. I'm just going to show you how to design something like this in InDesign as well. So what you can do is go ahead and drag and drop some of your jpegs into this file. And you'll just need to click Command Shift and size it to the grid. Then, then what I typically like to do is command paste and then repeat these fat. We can start to see this come to life. So then I like to line it up too, actual square, and then I will duplicate this as well. And then line it up. So now we have all of the squares in there. And then what you will then do is be able to click on one of the images and then actually be able to drag and drop different JPEGS from your file just to display what your brand guide actually looks like. So I will just go ahead and drag and drop that into the middle. And it's always good to display all of the different pages on your brand guide to kind of display your work in various different ways. So the more pages you have, obviously the better this will look. But if you have a smaller brand guide, don't worry. You can choose to make this maybe nine images or even six images, and then scale it from there. So don't be afraid to play around with what you're working with. There is lots of mood boards here. Put some logos there, maybe some cover photos as well. Because there are lots of covers. Put that there. So I'm actually going to change and put this mood board there and then maybe put something or clean in the middle. This. So I am liking the look of that. And then you can always change the color of the background similar to how you did the brand guide document. And then you can go to this section here. And then now what I wanna do is then perhaps add a shadow. So I am going to go to effects and click Drop Shadow, and you'll want to click Preview. And then you can then change the opacity to maybe 20% and then also maybe decrease the size to something smaller, maybe one pixel. And then Offset. I'm going to change these to three to make it a bit more subtle. So I'm liking the look of that. Let me see what that looks like now. And now. I can then change the design of it. If I, oops, if I want to move things around and center, I can do so. I can group all of these together so it makes it easy and then center it within the page. Right-click align to page center. Center. Alternatively, you could even rotate it to get more of that artsy look, maybe expand it so that there are things going off the grid. And basically there you have it, then you just need to go to Export again and then export this as a JPEG. Click Save export. So then once it's ready and once you have successfully exported it, you can then use this to upload onto B hand struggle Instagram, and even upload it to this class project section after you finish your class project, I just wanted to show you how you can display your brand guide after you complete it without just exporting the PDF. But essentially, once you go to your Finder, you will then be able to see for brand guide overview here. And then this will be ready to upload or put wherever you choose. So that is essentially how you export it and how you can display your brand guide and your work to prospective clients or add to your portfolio. And I think it's always good to have some sort of visual and overview of all of the design elements as they come together in one place. So I hope that helps and I'll see you guys in the next video. 9. Your Turn: Now it's time to take everything you've learned in this class and finally incorporate it into creating your own brand guide. For your class projects, you can choose one of two options. The first option is to create your own brand guide, for your own personal brand or for business you aspire to create. Perhaps you can choose to create a brand guide for your own design studio of vintage clothing boutique or even a cozy coffee shop. The second option is to design a brand guide with existing brand assets that you've created in the past. You can essentially pull brand collateral from existing clients or past clients. Or you can even pull from a different Skillshare class or a school project. Once completed, the shorts upload your final brand guide designs. It's the class project section of this class. Then along with your uploaded file, make sure you answer the following questions. Number one is to make sure you provide an introduction and overview of the brand guide design that you've created. The secondary is more for fun, and I want you to explain the part that you enjoyed most about creating your own brand guide. I'm constantly reviewing student's projects and I genuinely loved giving feedback. So make sure you upload your final designs for me to see. I can't wait to see all of your projects and see what designs you come up with. 10. Thank You: Thank you for taking this class and I hope you learn a lot about the entire brand guided design process. If you enjoy taking this class, I'd love if he could leave a review as I genuinely loved hearing feedback from my students, if you'd like to stay up to date with all future classes that I published in relation to design a branding or marketing. Make sure you give me a follow by hitting the Follow button. I love sharing my work and behind the scenes look of my life as an entrepreneur on Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest to be sure to give me a follow outside of Skillshare on one of these platforms at usually for steel. Again, thanks so much for being here and I can't wait to see all of the designs that you create.