Your brand guidelines shouldn't live in a PDF
Why a PDF is the wrong home for brand guidelines, and what a living, password protected brand site does better for small businesses, podcasts and their collaborators.
2 min readMichael Overton
You paid for a brand. Logo, colours, type, the rules for using them. It arrived as a forty page PDF. It's in a folder somewhere. The social media person has version two, the printer has version one, and the new freelancer was sent a screenshot.
This is how good brands drift, and it's not anyone's fault. It's the PDF's.
What a PDF can't do
It can't be updated without being re-sent to everyone. It can't hold the actual files, so people email asking for "the logo in white". It can't be linked to from a message. It's unreadable on a phone. And once it's been downloaded, you have no idea which version anyone is looking at.
Guidelines are a reference. References should be looked up, not kept.
What I built instead
I'm building a platform to hold all my clients' brand guidelines online. Each client gets their own address, behind their own password. On it: the logo in every format, downloadable; the colours with values you can copy; the typefaces with where to get them; the rules, with examples of right and wrong; templates for the things they make most.
When a brand changes, it changes in one place, and everyone sees the new version next time they open it. The podcast I co-host is on it. So is a podcast brand I designed this year. Nobody's emailed me for a logo file since.
Why this matters more for small businesses
Big companies have brand teams to police consistency. Small ones have the owner, who is also doing the accounts. A brand that's easy to use correctly gets used correctly. One that requires hunting through a folder gets approximated, and approximated brands look cheap.
What good guidelines contain
Not forty pages. A page or two of what matters: the logo and its clear space, the colours, the type, the tone of voice in a paragraph, three examples of it done right. Everything else is noise. If a new collaborator can't be on brand within ten minutes of opening it, it's too long.
If you've got a brand and a PDF, I can turn it into a living guidelines site. If you haven't got a brand yet, that's the other thing I do.
