Brand Guidelines Design Service
One document that makes every future design decision easier for everyone.
The Coast creates professionally designed brand guidelines documents that serve as the definitive reference for your visual identity. Whether you have an existing brand that needs codifying or a new identity that needs documenting, we build a clear, comprehensive style guide covering logo usage rules, colour palette specifications, typographic hierarchy, imagery direction, and tone of voice — formatted for PDF distribution and digital use.
Deliverables
What's Included
How We Work
Our Process
Discover
We review all your existing brand assets — logos, colour files, fonts, any previous style documentation — and interview key stakeholders to understand how the brand is currently used and what problems the guidelines need to solve.
Design
We build the guidelines document structure and design the layout to be visually aligned with your brand. We draft all sections and populate them with your brand specifications, examples, and usage rules.
Develop
We refine the document through a structured review round, addressing any missing sections, unclear instructions, or specification corrections. We ensure every rule is practical and actionable for designers who are unfamiliar with your brand.
Launch
We deliver a polished, print-ready PDF and a digital-optimised version. We also provide a plain-text colour and font specification sheet for quick reference in everyday design work.
Ideal For
Who This Is For
Businesses with Teams
Multiple people creating content or collateral who need a single source of brand truth to maintain consistency.
Working with Vendors
Printing companies, web developers, and freelancers all need brand specifications to implement your identity correctly.
Franchises & Multi-Location
Standardised guidelines ensure brand consistency across every location, regardless of who creates the local materials.
Funded & Scaling Businesses
Investor and partner presentations require demonstrable brand discipline — a comprehensive style guide signals professionalism.
FAQs
Common Questions
What should brand guidelines include?
Comprehensive brand guidelines should include: logo usage rules covering spacing, minimum size, permitted colour variations, and common misuse examples; colour palette specifications with HEX codes for digital, RGB for screen design tools, CMYK for print, and Pantone (PMS) matches for brand-critical print applications; typographic hierarchy defining which fonts are used for headings, subheadings, body copy, captions, and labels — with examples; imagery and photography direction describing the visual tone, subject matter, and editing style that aligns with your brand; pattern and graphic element usage rules; and a tone of voice section covering your brand's personality in writing, example phrases, and words to avoid. The document should be detailed enough that a designer who has never worked with your brand before can produce on-brand work from it alone.
Do I need brand guidelines if I'm a small business?
Yes — arguably more so than large businesses. Small businesses typically have limited in-house design capacity and rely on a rotating cast of freelancers, agencies, and platform tools to produce their materials. Without brand guidelines, each of those contributors makes independent creative decisions about colours, fonts, and logo usage. Over time, this produces a fragmented brand that customers don't recognise. Brand guidelines don't need to be a 100-page enterprise-scale document — a focused 20-page style guide covering logo, colour, typography, and tone of voice is sufficient for most small businesses and pays for itself immediately by eliminating costly back-and-forth with every new design project.
Can you create guidelines for a brand you didn't design?
Yes. The brand guidelines service is available as a standalone project for existing brands. We'll request all your existing brand assets — original logo files, any colour references, font information, and any previous brand documentation — and build a comprehensive, professionally designed style guide from those materials. If we find gaps in your existing brand (missing file formats, unclear colour specifications, inconsistent logo versions), we'll flag them and can remediate them as part of the project scope. This is a common first project for businesses that have a reasonable brand in place but have never formally documented it.
Also Available
You Might Also Need
Ready to get started?
Brand Guidelines— let's build something worth noticing.