How long should a brand book be?

Long enough to be usable and short enough to be read. For a smaller company the essentials often fit in a few dozen pages; usability matters more than volume.

Does tone of voice belong in a brand book?

Yes. As soon as tone of voice sits in a separate file it gets forgotten. Include at least five do/don't examples taken from your own material.

What goes into a brand book? Every component explained

A brand book is made up of four layers: the brand foundation, the verbal identity, the visual identity and the applications. Each layer builds on the one before it. Below is what you record in each part, how detailed it needs to be, and where things typically go wrong in practice.

Want the full overview first? Start with our guide to the brand book.

Short answer

A professional brand book should contain at least: positioning, brand values, target audiences, core message, tone of voice, logo usage, a colour palette with complete colour codes, typography, imagery style, layout principles, applications per channel, and governance agreements (version, owner, file location).

Layer 1: the brand foundation

This section explains why you exist and what you stand for. It's the shortest part of a brand book, and at the same time the part that takes the most time, because it's about choices rather than layout.

Component	What you record	Common pitfall
Mission and vision	Why you exist and where you're heading	Sentences that could apply to any company
Brand values	Three to five values, translated into behaviour	"Trustworthy" with no explanation of what that means
Positioning	One sentence: for whom, what, and how you differ	Trying to be everything to everyone
Target audiences	Who you serve, in their own words	Demographics without motivation or language
Brand personality	How the brand behaves: down-to-earth, warm, direct	A list of adjectives with no consequence attached

What works in our experience: link every brand value to one visible consequence. "Direct" might mean, for example, that you mention price indications in the first conversation and never send a ten-page proposal. Without that consequence, a value is just decoration.

Layer 2: the verbal identity

This is about language. Many brand books skip this part, even though far more text than imagery gets produced every day.

Core message: what you say in one paragraph when someone asks what you do.
Proposition per audience: the same promise, but in that audience's own words.
Tone of voice: how you address people, sentence length, humour, jargon, how you deliver bad news.
Writing rules: headings, bullet lists, how you write numbers, capitalisation, how you write your own name and product names.
Do/don't examples: at least five rewrites of real sentences from your own communication.

That last point matters most. Abstract principles get interpreted differently by different people; a concrete rewrite doesn't. In our own brand books we always include two columns: "not like this" and "like this", using real sentences from a website or a proposal.

More on the writing side is covered on our copywriting page.

Layer 3: the visual identity

This is the part most people mean when they say "brand style". Be concrete and technical here: this is a section people look up, not read cover to cover.

Component	What it should contain at minimum
Logo	Primary version, variants (horizontal, icon-only, mono), minimum size, clear space, prohibited uses
Colour	Primary and secondary colours with HEX, RGB and CMYK; usage ratios; contrast rules for text
Typography	Font families, weights, heading scale, line height, webfont fallbacks
Imagery	Photo style, what you do and don't photograph, editing, aspect ratios, illustration or icon style
Layout	Grid, margins, white space, how elements behave on mobile and desktop
Motion	If you use video or animation: pace, style, do's and don'ts

Two practical additions that often get forgotten. First: test your colour combinations for readability before you lock them in — a lovely light grey on white will disappear for a chunk of your visitors. You can check that yourself with our contrast checker. Second: describe the webfont variant. A brand that works on paper but falls back to a default font on the website doesn't actually work in practice.

Layer 4: applications

Without this layer, a brand book stays theoretical. Work out the channels you actually use — not every channel that exists.

Website: heading structure, buttons, forms, use of imagery
Social: post formats, text length, how you place the logo
Presentations: a template with a title slide, a text slide, a data slide
Email: newsletter layout and the email signature
Documents: proposals, invoices, reports
Physical: business cards, staff clothing, signage, trade-show materials (only if relevant)

Our experience: three good templates deliver more consistency than twenty pages of rules. The easiest path should also be the right path.

Governance: the part that's almost always missing

Put four things at the back — or better, at the front:

Version number and date
Who owns it and who decides in case of doubt
Where the source files live and who grants access
When the brand book gets reviewed

Without an owner, exceptions quietly become the new norm, and after two years half of it no longer matches reality.

What you can leave out

More isn't better. For an organisation of up to around 25 people, we often leave out: elaborate brand archetypes, historical brand stories, Pantone specifications if nothing is ever printed, and detailed rules for channels you don't use. What's left is shorter — and actually gets used.

Frequently asked questions

How many pages should a brand book have? In our experience, 20 to 60. For a small business, 20 to 30 is usually enough. Usability matters more than length.

Should tone of voice be included, or kept as a separate document? Include it. The moment it's separated out, it gets forgotten. You can still add a longer appendix with more examples.

How detailed should colour codes be? Complete: HEX and RGB for digital, CMYK for print, plus Pantone if relevant. Also note which colour is used for what, and which text colour is allowed on top of it.

Also read: creating a brand book in six steps, examples and a template, or what a brand book involves.