Creating a brand book: a six-step plan

Creating a brand book is mostly about making decisions, not about design. The design work usually takes less time than sharpening your positioning. Below is the step-by-step approach we use in our own projects, including what tends to come up along the way.

The full overview of the topic is in our guide to the brand book.

Short answer

You build a brand book in six steps: take stock of what already exists, hold a brand conversation, lock in the positioning, work out the verbal and visual guidelines, create applications and templates, and roll the document out inside the organisation. Expect the process to take some weeks rather than days.

Step 1. Take stock of what already exists

Don't start with a blank document. Gather everything currently in circulation: website, proposals, presentations, social posts, printed materials, email signatures. Lay it all side by side and mark where it's inconsistent.

That overview does two things. It makes visible internally why this is needed — often more convincing than any argument — and it immediately provides material for the do/don't examples.

Questions to answer here:

• Who currently produces materials, and with which tools?
• Which files are in use, and which versions are floating around?
• Where does it most often go wrong, and what does the clean-up cost?

Step 2. The brand conversation

One session of two to three hours with a maximum of five people. Include someone with decision-making authority and someone with daily customer contact. Larger groups produce consensus text that nobody can actually use.

Topics: why do we exist, what do we promise, how are we genuinely different, which customers fit us and which don't, and where do we disagree internally. That last question usually delivers the most.

What we hold firm on here: every claim that gets written down needs to be backed up. No "market leader" without a number, no "the best" without proof. What you can't demonstrate stays as an ambition, or gets cut.

Step 3. Sharpen the positioning

Write one sentence that's true and that you're willing to repeat: who it's for, what you do, and how you're different. This is the hardest part, and usually the reason a process drags on.

A useful test: have three people who weren't in the conversation read the sentence and ask what they think you sell and to whom. If their answers don't match, the sentence is still too vague.

Tools we often use for this are covered on brand strategy and positioning and, if you also want to map the market side, in our SWOT analysis tool.

Step 4. Verbal and visual guidelines

Only now does form come into play. Work out the tone of voice with real rewrites from your own material, and record the visual identity technically: logo variants, colour codes (HEX, RGB, CMYK), typography including the webfont variant, imagery style and layout principles.

Check your colour combinations for readability right away — that saves you from having to revisit your brand style six months later. You can do that with our contrast checker.

Every component that comes up here is worked out in detail in what goes into a brand book.

Step 5. Applications and templates

Translate the rules into something usable tomorrow. Our standard minimum set: the website, one presentation template, one social template and the email signature. Beyond that, each organisation adds something specific, such as a proposal template or trade-show materials.

This is the step where the brand book pays for itself. Three good templates deliver more consistency than twenty pages of rules, because the easiest path then is also the right path.

Step 6. Rolling it out inside the organisation

The step most often skipped, and the one that determines whether the document actually lives.

1. Present it live to the whole team, including sales and support.
2. Put it in one fixed place everyone knows — ideally online rather than a PDF on a drive.
3. Include it in the onboarding process for new hires.
4. Appoint one brand owner as the point of contact for doubts.
5. Plan one review moment per year.

Timeline and who you need

Do it yourself, or get help?

Doing it yourself works fine if you have a designer and a copywriter in-house and someone who can drive the process. If you get stuck on positioning, or the document keeps getting postponed, outside help is usually faster than another six months of drifting. What a project typically involves is covered on what a brand book involves; our approach is on brand book as a service.

Common mistakes in the process

• Starting with the logo instead of the positioning
• Too many people at the table during the brand conversation
• Guidelines without examples, so everyone applies their own interpretation
• Delivering without a presentation: an emailed PDF doesn't get read
• No owner, so exceptions become the new norm

Further reading: brand book examples and structure and the difference with brand guidelines.