Introduction

This blog post is about branding style sheets.

A branding style sheet/guide is a record of all of the elements that make up a company’s graphic branding – things like fonts, typography, colours and logos. It also has variations on fonts, colour combinations and logos to fit with different contexts – there might be one logo for use in video idents, a separate logo for websites and another logo for posters.

Important things to include in a branding sheet

• Variations of the logo

• A colour palette will also include the hexadecimal code, RGB and CMYK numbers for each colour.

• Brand style sheets also include information on fonts and guidelines for using them – are they bold or thin? Italics? What colour is the text?

Example – Spotify

This PDF is a branding style sheet for companies who are working with Spotify and using their logos and branding to create promotional material.

It contains information about the logo (made up of an icon and a wordmark) and how it should be used, how a graphic design should be laid out using the guidelines, the colours to use and the fonts that Spotify uses.

Example 2 – Blender

The open source 3D modelling software Blender has usage guidelines for its logo, for providing credit to them in a project created using their software.

https://www.blender.org/about/logo/#guidelines

It includes a logo kit which is a ZIP file including all of the variations of the blender logo and different sizes and file formats to be used in print, web, and in video.

There are also usage guidelines for how to use the logo, the main point is to use it as secondary branding only, in conjunction with other logos and brands to show that blender software has been used in the project and to avoid affiliation that isn’t official with the brand.

This webpage makes it very clear how to use the blender logo in projects of different sorts – projects that were made with the software, in merchandise and on webpages.

Logo Creation

In order to produce a branding guidelines sheet, I would first have to create a logo for myself. Here are some concepts I made. When creating these concepts I decided to use a particular hand-drawn style to show my creativity and approach to animation.

I ended up choosing one of the first designs I drew. Here it is fully-sized.

conclusion

If you want to see how I used my logo in a branding style sheet, read this blog post:

https://media.confetti.ac.uk/alexander-xs21-yr2/?p=1198

Over all, researching how branding style sheets are used helped me when creating my own.