Brand identity guidelines help keep all assets, across channels and products, consistent, recognizable and familiar. They help to ensure that with each branded interaction, it's *more* likely that your customers and readers will be able to remember you.
Whether you already have a brand book, or are in the process of pulling together your brand guidelines, it's often helpful to have them ready to access in a structured, easily-navigated form. Naturally, I recommend Notion for doing this, and this Notion Brand Book component template helps you organize all the key assets and elements of your brand guidelines into a coherently linked workspace.
Inside, you'll find sections for:
A little bit about each section and what to include below.
Your mission statement should be a brief, clear and focused articulation of your brand's purpose. It should be something that everyone in your organization can rally behind.
Your vision statement is a description of how your business envisions a world with your core mission solved. It's more long-term than your mission, and can help provide guidance and direction when making decisions about your brand.
Your brand values are the guiding principles that inform everything you do as a company. Choose a small handful of values that truly reflect what your brand stands for, and make sure everyone in your organization is aware of them.
Your design assets include everything from logos and color palettes to photography and typography guidelines. This is the section where you'll upload all the files and specifications related to your visual identity.
Your logo is one of the most important elements of your visual identity. Include a high-res version of your logo here, along with any alternate versions or lockups. Be sure to include clear spacing and size specifications.
Your photography should be on-brand and consistent with the overall aesthetic of your website and other marketing materials. Include guidelines for imagery and which types of photos to use (and avoid) in different situations.
Your typography choices should be in line with the overall tone of your brand. Include font families, weights, and styles that work well together and complement your logo. Specify when and how to use headlines, subheads, and body copy.
Hopefully this gives you a better idea of what goes into a brand book, and how you can use Notion to create your own. If you're interested in trying out the template, you can find it here.
This brand book template also doubles as (or can help you quickly construct) media kits. If you work in PR or marketing, you know how important having an up-to-date media kit on hand can be. A media kit is a document (usually a one or two pager) that contains all the information a journalist or blogger would need to write about your company.
Your media kit should include:
Quickly construct your media kits from the elements stored in this Brand Book template, and update them accordingly as your files and assets get updated.
What better example for us to share than our very own internal simple Brand Guidelines for Landmark Labs.
You can see how we think about our Mission & Vision.
Read up on our Story for a clear example of the exercise in action.
We also consider our Audience, Brand Values and Tone of Voice.
Finally, an important part of any Brand Guidelines is Design Assets — in this case, we’re dealing with logo placement, colors & typography.
Get started by hitting 'Copy to Notion' to start using this Brand Book component for your business. This is a Pro Component, and as such is included with any Pro Access membership plan.
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