How to create brand guidelines

Brand guidelines answer the questions partners, printers, new designers and sales teams ask every week. Which logo goes on a dark background? What’s the exact green? Can we stretch the wordmark to fit this banner? When the answers live in someone’s head or an outdated PDF, the brand drifts a little with every presentation and trade show stand.

This guide covers the visual side of a brand: logo usage, color, typography, imagery and the asset files that go with them. It looks at how companies usually produce brand guidelines, where those formats fall short in practice, and how to build guidelines in Fabric with the rules and the downloadable assets in one place.

How companies usually create brand guidelines

The classic format is a brand book: a designed PDF of twenty to sixty pages, often produced by the agency that created the identity. It looks polished and explains the thinking well. It’s also static. When a color is adjusted or a new logo lockup is added, the PDF needs a designer to update it, and old copies keep circulating by email for years.

The assets usually live separately, in a shared drive folder called Logos or Brand, with names like logo_final_new_white.png. People download whatever they find first. Brand asset management looks at why that folder tends to sprawl.

Larger organizations use dedicated brand portal or digital asset management platforms, which combine guidelines, asset downloads and permissions. They’re built for big brand teams and priced for them. Design tools with brand kits keep colors and logos handy inside that tool, which helps the people working in it and less so the printer, the partner or the sales rep who isn’t.

Step 1: Collect the brand assets in one space

Create a space for the brand and a small set of folders: Logos, Color, Typography, Photography, Templates. Move in the master files. The Fabric desktop app mounts Fabric as a drive on Mac, Windows and Linux, so designers can copy assets in from Finder or File Explorer and open them from there in their design apps.

Include each logo in the formats people ask for: vector for print, PNG for slides and the web, and versions for light and dark backgrounds. Print vs. digital design formats explains which formats suit which use. Clear out duplicates as you go, so there’s one approved file per variant.

As files arrive, Fabric writes a short summary of each, extracts attributes including colors and content type, and suggests tags. That makes the collection easier to work with before you’ve written a word of the guidelines.

Step 2: Write the rules next to the assets

Create a document in the notes and docs editor for the guidelines themselves. Typical sections are brand story, logo usage (clear space, minimum size, what not to do), color palette with HEX, RGB and CMYK values, typography, photography and illustration style, and a short note on tone of voice.

Embed the actual asset files in each section, so the logo rules sit directly above the logo files and the color section shows the swatches people need. Readers then get the rule and the file from the same place instead of reading a PDF and hunting for the logo in a separate drive.

If you’re starting from scratch, What is a brand kit? covers what a minimal set of brand materials includes.

Step 3: Make assets findable by color and look

People rarely search for brand assets by filename. With Fabric search, they can describe the file instead, such as “white logo for dark backgrounds” or “team photo in the office”, or paste a brand HEX code to find assets in that color.

To find everything that matches a reference, select an image and run a similarity search, which compares composition, color and subject. It’s useful for spotting off-brand photography or older logo versions that are still floating around. Smart collections can gather assets by content as they’re added, for example every photograph or every presentation template.

Step 4: Publish the guidelines as a brand page

To give partners, agencies and suppliers access, publish the guidelines folder as a web page. Click Share, open the Publish tab and click Create link. Give the link a name, allow downloads so people can take the files they need, and choose whether search engines may index it. Editing the guideline or replacing an asset in Fabric updates the published page, so people with the link see the current version.

On the Pro plan you can publish on your own domain or a subdomain, such as a brand address under your company’s domain, through the domain selector in the publishing screen. For unreleased identities, add password protection on Pro or Team; there’s no password reset, so store it in a password manager. You can also create a separate published link for each agency with analytics turned on to see visits from each.

Step 5: Review new work against the guidelines

When an agency or a colleague produces something new, share it with the brand owner as a commenter. They can draw on the image and attach a comment, pointing at the logo that’s too close to the edge or the color that’s slightly off. Each comment can be marked completed once it’s fixed.

For quick questions, open the brand folder and ask the AI assistant, for example what the minimum logo size for print is. It answers from the guidelines and assets in that folder and cites them, so the person asking can see the rule for themselves.

Frequently asked questions

What should brand guidelines include?

Usually logo usage, a color palette with exact values, typography, imagery style, a short tone of voice section, and the approved asset files for each.

What’s the difference between brand guidelines and a style guide?

The terms overlap. Brand guidelines usually cover visual identity and assets, while a style guide often refers to writing conventions such as tone, grammar and terminology.

Should brand guidelines be a PDF or a web page?

A PDF is easy to send but needs reissuing after each change. A published web page updates in place, which keeps partners on the current version.

How do I share brand assets with an agency?

Publish the brand folder as a link with downloads allowed, or share the space with them as viewers if they also need to comment.

Can I put brand guidelines on my own domain?

Yes, on the Pro plan. Choose Add custom domain from the domain selector when publishing, add the DNS records Fabric shows you, and validate.

Can I find brand assets by color?

Yes. Paste a HEX code or use the color picker in Fabric search.

Can I keep unreleased brand guidelines private?

Yes. Content is private unless shared or published, and on Pro and Team plans you can add password protection to a file or folder.

What does Fabric cost for a brand team?

Publishing with downloads is on every plan. Custom domains, password protection and link analytics need a paid plan, and team pricing is not per seat. See team pricing.