Brand Guidelines: What to Include and How to Use Them

Brand guidelines are a practical rulebook that tells anyone producing material for your business how to use your name, logo, colours, typography, imagery and voice. Good guidelines include the assets themselves, clear rules with visual examples, and ready-made templates. They are only useful if the people who make things — staff, freelancers, agencies, printers — can find them, understand them in a few minutes and apply them without help.

Many businesses own a beautiful brand book that nobody opens. The difference between that and a working set of guidelines is less about design and more about who it is written for.

Start with who will use it

Before deciding on contents, list the people who will rely on the document and what they will try to do with it:

• A social media manager making a carousel at short notice.
• A sales team member building a proposal in PowerPoint.
• A printer preparing signage or exhibition graphics.
• An agency producing ads in Arabic and English.
• A new receptionist setting up an email signature.

Each needs a different level of detail. The printer needs exact colour values and file formats. The salesperson needs a template and three rules. Write for the busiest person on the list.

What to include

Foundations

• Brand summary. One page on who you serve, what you promise and how you want to be perceived. Keep it short; long strategy decks belong elsewhere.
• Voice and tone. Personality traits, words you use and avoid, and before-and-after examples. Include guidance for Arabic copy as well as English, since tone does not always translate directly.

Visual identity

• Logo. Every approved version, clear space, minimum size, placement on photos and colour backgrounds, and a page of misuse examples (stretched, recoloured, outlined, crowded).
• Colour. Primary and secondary palettes with HEX, RGB, CMYK and any Pantone references, plus proportions — which colour dominates and which are accents.
• Typography. Typefaces for Arabic and English, weights, a type scale for headings and body text, and fallback fonts for tools like email and Office.
• Imagery. Photography style with examples of what fits and what does not; illustration and icon styles; rules for using stock images.
• Layout. Grids, graphic devices, and how to handle right-to-left Arabic layouts alongside left-to-right English.

Applications

Show the identity in use: social posts, ad formats, presentations, letterheads, business cards, signage, vehicle graphics, uniforms, video titles and lower thirds. Applications teach faster than rules because people copy what they see.

Behaviour

Short standards for how the brand behaves: email sign-offs, WhatsApp greetings, response language, how to reply to public complaints. These keep the experience consistent where design cannot reach.

How to write rules that get followed

Weak rule	Stronger rule
Use the logo appropriately	Use the full-colour logo on white or light grey; use the white logo on photos and dark backgrounds
Keep a professional tone	Write short sentences, avoid jargon, and address the reader as "you"
Use brand colours	Teal leads; use coral only for buttons and highlights, never for large backgrounds
Choose good images	Show real people in real UAE settings; avoid staged handshake and laptop shots

Every rule should be specific enough that two people would apply it the same way. Pair each rule with a correct and an incorrect example.

Format: PDF or living document?

A PDF is easy to share with printers and suppliers, but it goes out of date silently. A living version — a shared web page, an internal portal or a well-organised cloud folder — can be updated in one place and linked from everywhere. Many businesses keep both: a living source of truth and a dated PDF export for external suppliers. Whatever you choose, keep the asset downloads next to the rules, so nobody screenshots a logo from your website.

Rolling guidelines out

Publishing guidelines changes nothing on its own. To make them stick:

1. Walk each team through the parts relevant to them in a short session.
2. Replace old templates in shared drives, and delete outdated logo files.
3. Name an owner who answers questions and approves exceptions.
4. Add guidelines to supplier and agency briefs; our article on writing a content brief writers can use shows how to reference them without overwhelming the brief.
5. Review the document at least once a year, and whenever you launch a new channel or product.

Key takeaways

• Write guidelines for the busiest person who will use them, not for the boardroom.
• Cover foundations, visual identity, applications and behaviour.
• Make every rule specific, and show correct and incorrect examples.
• Keep a living source of truth with downloadable assets alongside the rules.
• Assign an owner and review regularly, as part of a wider system for brand consistency across channels.

Guidelines are a core deliverable of Wot Digital's corporate identity services. If your current brand book is gathering dust, contact us to turn it into something your team will actually use.