What is a branding guide?

A branding guide, also called a brand style guide or brand guidelines, is the document that explains how a brand looks and sounds in use. It sets the rules for the logo, color, typography, imagery and voice, and shows them applied to real formats so anyone producing material, from a new hire to an outside agency, makes the same choices the brand team would.

What does the style guide explain?

A style guide explains which logo files to use and how much space to leave around them, the exact color codes and where each one goes, which fonts and weights to set, what on-brand photography looks like, and how the brand writes. Good guides also show do and don't examples, because a picture of a stretched logo is understood faster than a sentence about it.

What is the standard size of a brandbook?

There's no fixed standard. Printed or PDF brand books are commonly laid out on A4 or US Letter pages, often in landscape, while many guides now live as web pages with no page size at all. Length ranges from a single page for a small business to well over 100 pages for global brands with print, motion and retail rules.

What should a brand style guide include?

At minimum: logo versions with clear space and minimum size, a color palette with hex, RGB and, for print, CMYK values, named fonts with weights and a fallback, photography or illustration references, a short voice section with an example, do and don't examples, and a few finished applications such as a social post, slide and email header.

Is there a free brand style guide template?

Yes. The compact template in this article lists every section with the blanks to fill in, and it copies straight into Google Docs, Notion or Word. For an early-stage company that wants a longer fill-in version with notes on what to skip, our startup brand guidelines template covers each section in more detail.

What's the difference between a brand style guide and a brand kit?

A brand style guide is the rulebook: it explains what to use, where and why. A brand kit is the toolbox: the actual logo files, color swatches, font files and reference images people open in a design tool. They work as a pair. The guide tells someone to use the white logo on dark photos; the kit hands them that file.

How long should a brand style guide be?

Long enough to answer real questions and short enough that someone finds a rule in under two minutes. Small brands usually manage with one to ten pages covering logo, color, type, imagery and voice. Guides grow when a brand adds print, packaging, motion or partner programs, and those sections are best kept separate so the core stays quick to scan.

How often should you update your brand style guide?

Core rules such as the logo and primary colors usually change only every few years. Application sections change more often, as platforms add formats and photography trends shift. Review the guide whenever a rule gets broken repeatedly, put the update date on the first page, and update the brand kit files at the same time so the two never disagree.

Brand Style Guide Examples and a Template to Copy

Brand style guides get opened by more people than the designers who wrote them: a freelancer making a launch graphic, an agency briefing a campaign, a developer picking a button color, an AI tool generating social posts. Looking at brand style guide examples side by side is the fastest way to see what actually helps those people. The useful guides share a few habits. They give numbers instead of adjectives, show mistakes instead of describing them, and keep each section short enough to read in a minute.

Direct answer. A brand style guide is the document that explains how a brand looks and sounds in use: logo rules, color, typography, imagery and voice, shown with examples. The best brand style guide examples, such as Spotify's design guidelines and Mailchimp's voice and tone guide, use exact measurements, named fonts, do and don't visuals and real sample lines.

Below, each section of a guide is shown through a public example, followed by the patterns they share and a compact brand style guide template you can copy.

Brand Style Guide Examples, Section by Section

Two public guides cover most of the ground here. Spotify publishes design guidelines for developers building on its platform, and Mailchimp publishes both a brand assets page and a separate content style guide. Neither is a full internal brand book, but both are written for outsiders, which makes them good models for any guide that people outside the design team will use.

Logo: rules you can measure

Spotify's logo section is almost entirely numbers. The clear zone around the logo is half the height of the icon. The full logo has a minimum size of 70px on screen and 20mm in print; the icon alone, 21px and 6mm. The green logo is reserved for black or white backgrounds, with a black logo on other light backgrounds, a white logo on dark ones, and a monochrome version everywhere else.

What to borrow: tie clear space to part of the logo itself, so it scales automatically, and give minimum sizes for both screen and print. Anyone can check "half the icon height" with a ruler. Nobody can check "plenty of breathing room".

Name and color: what to call things

Mailchimp's brand assets page opens with the name before the logo: Mailchimp is one word, with a capital M and a lowercase c. Its colors carry names, Cavendish Yellow as the main "hero" color and Peppercorn for accents, which gives the team a shared vocabulary.

What to borrow: if your brand name is often misspelled or mis-capitalized, put the correct form first. Name your colors, but in your own guide pair every name with hex, RGB and, for print, CMYK values. A public partner page can stay light; the internal guide is where people need codes they can paste.

Typography: a fallback order

Spotify asks partners to use the platform's default sans-serif and, when that isn't available, to try Helvetica Neue, then Helvetica, then Arial, in that order. It's a small detail that solves a common problem: what to do when the brand font isn't installed.

What to borrow: list your primary fonts with weights and sizes, then a fallback chain. Sales decks, email clients and shared laptops are where brand typography usually breaks, and a fallback order keeps those materials close to the original.

Voice and tone: pairs, not adjectives

Mailchimp's voice and tone guide is the example most writing teams end up studying. Its voice is clear and direct, warm and relatable, explanatory, and dryly funny, and it sets limits with pairs: "weird but not inappropriate, smart but not snobbish". It also separates two ideas many guides blur, noting that "our voice doesn't change much from day to day, but our tone changes all the time." When unsure, writers are told to keep a straight face.

What to borrow: write three or four voice traits, each with a "but not" limit. Then add guidance on adjusting tone to the moment, such as an error message versus a launch announcement.

Imagery: rules about what not to touch

Spotify's artwork rules are a clear model for imagery sections. Partners use album and podcast artwork exactly as supplied, with no cropping, distorting or overlaying, and round its corners to 4px on small and medium devices and 8px on large ones.

What to borrow: an imagery section works best as a short set of rules plus a reference gallery. Show eight to twelve approved images and annotate what makes each one right: the light, the distance from the subject, the setting. Those references also give AI image tools something concrete to follow. In Playyy, a reference image can be applied with style transfer, so new visuals pick up the same light and color treatment rather than relying on a written description.

Do and don't: show the mistake

Both guides list the misuses they see most. Spotify's list is specific: don't rotate, stretch or recolor the logo, use it inside a sentence, or place it over busy, low-contrast areas. Mailchimp tells outsiders not to alter the logo files or use them in a way that suggests an endorsement.

What to borrow: collect the mistakes that have actually happened to your brand, then show each one as a small crossed-out image next to the correct version. One visual pair is understood faster than a paragraph.

Applications: finished examples

The section people copy most is the one that shows the brand applied: a social post, a slide, an email header, a business card. Many published guides keep these in a separate template library, but even three finished examples inside the guide answer the most common question, "what should this look like in my format?", without anyone interpreting rules.

What the Best Style Guide Examples Have in Common

Across brands and industries, the guides that get used follow the same pattern.

Numbers over adjectives. Clear space, minimum sizes, hex codes, font weights and corner radii are all things a person can check.
Pictures over paragraphs. Do and don't pairs, annotated reference images and finished layouts carry most of the meaning.
One question per section. Each part answers something people actually ask, such as which logo goes on a dark photo.
Written for outsiders. The best guides assume the reader isn't a designer and has two minutes.
Dated and owned. A visible "last updated" date and a named owner tell readers whether the file is current and who to ask.

A Compact Brand Style Guide Template

Copy this one-page brand style guide template into any document editor and fill in the right-hand column. Each row mirrors one of the sections above.

Section	What to fill in	Example entry
Name	Correct spelling and capitalization	"Northfield", one word, capital N
Logo	Versions, clear space, minimum size (screen and print), 3–4 don'ts	Clear space = height of the icon; 80px / 25mm
Color	Name + hex + RGB (+ CMYK) for each color, and where it's used	Harbor Blue #1B4DB1 for buttons and links
Typography	Heading and body fonts with weights, sizes and a fallback chain	Inter SemiBold / Inter Regular 16/24, then Arial
Imagery	Link to 8–12 reference images, plus "always" and "avoid" notes	Daylight, real customers, no posed stock
Voice	3–4 traits with "but not" limits, plus one sample line	Confident but not smug
Do / don't	Visual pairs of the most common mistakes	Stretched logo, low-contrast text
Applications	3 finished examples in your most-used formats	Social post, slide, email header
Owner	Version date, file locations and who answers questions	v2.1, Oct 2026, design lead

For an early-stage company that wants a longer fill-in version, with notes on what to include now and what can wait, use our startup brand guidelines template.

Style Guide, Brand Guidelines and Brand Kit

The terms overlap, and most teams use the first two interchangeably. A brand style guide and brand guidelines both describe the rules. A brand kit is something different: the working files those rules point to, such as logo files, swatches, font files and reference images. Our guide to what a brand kit includes breaks down the difference with examples.

The quickest way to get a first draft of both is to start from what's already public. A brand kit generator like Playyy's reads your website URL, pulls your logo, colors and headline and body fonts, and writes guidelines covering personality, voice, color usage, typography, logo usage, imagery, composition and best practices. The kit then applies automatically to every new design. Review the draft, correct anything that's off, and move the final values into the template above.

Keeping a Style Guide Accurate

A guide that was right two years ago and hasn't been touched since can be worse than none, because it gives people confidence in outdated files. Two habits prevent that.

Date it where people will see it. Put the update date on the first page and in the file name, so anyone opening the guide knows immediately whether it's current.

Update the files with the rules. Whenever a rule changes, update the brand kit in the same sitting. A guide that lists the primary color as #1A2E5C while the shared design library still holds #1B2F5D produces work that looks almost right and never quite matches.

Good brand style guide examples all do the same thing in different styles: they turn taste into decisions anyone can repeat. Borrow Spotify's measurable logo rules and Mailchimp's voice pairs, fill in the template, and keep it short enough to read in one sitting. When it's ready to share, the AI document generator can lay it out in your brand colors and export it as a PDF.