BackCreating a Brand Guide From Scratch: Documenting Echobind’s New Visual Identity
The past few months, Echobind's design team has been hard at work creating a new brand guide for the company. We launched a new website and visual identity near the end of 2022, and with that came the need for a brand guide to help all employees use our brand assets in a way that consistently communicates who we are to potential clients and new hires.
What is a Brand Guide?
A brand guide is essentially a manual for a company's brand. It includes all of the important information about the brand's visual identity, such as the logo, colors, typography, and voice and tone. It's important for a company to have a brand guide because it helps ensure that their brand is being presented consistently across all channels and platforms. Brand consistency drives brand recognition and helps build trust with clients. When a brand is consistently presented, it becomes easier for customers to recognize and remember, which can lead to increased loyalty.
How We Created Our Brand Guide
Auditing Our Existing Brand
We started with a brand audit. We used Figjam to collect our previous brand guides, our website redesign files, and other brand decks for inspiration.
Here’s what the Figjam file looked like:
Defining the Outline
Once we completed our audit, we outlined the sections we wanted to include in our new brand guide. Many brand guides include more detailed sections on things like target market, buyer personas, illustration, iconography, and other topics, but we narrowed our list down to only the essential parts of our brand that were directly relevant to the brand collateral our employees create on a regular basis.
Here’s the table of contents we decided on:
Writing the Content
Next, we wrote the content for each section and designed slides using Figma (our favorite design and prototyping tool), dropping in helpful visuals and assets along the way. We organized the slides in Figma from left to right, giving a title slide to each section.
Here’s what the work in progress looked like:
In addition to guidelines about our brand's visual identity, we also included some general tips on how to improve your design skills. We knew many of the employees who would be using this guide would not be full-time designers. Adding general tips empowers our non-designer colleagues to create with confidence without feeling like they need to ping our design team before sending out a newsletter or posting to social media.
Here’s the short list of design tips we included:
Where appropriate we linked to useful assets like our repository of approved logos and our component library in Figma. We also wrote content on how to use the guide to make it easy to navigate based on what you’re trying to accomplish - sort of a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Brand Guide.
While we still need to write a section for imagery and accessibility, we’ve made a lot of progress on putting together a guide that helps define the most important parts of our brand and makes it easy for all Echobind employees to use our brand assets correctly.
Our 2022 Brand Guide
Free Brand Guide Checklist
If you are creating a brand guide of your own we’ve created a free Brand Guide Checklist that you can get below. If you use it, be sure to tweet us @echobind with a picture of your own brand guide.
