Brand(s)

Brand manual, logotype & tone of voice

Your brand is the accumulated promise you have made to the world, and it lives in far more places than the logo file.

Brand documentation is not just for designers. When a new team member writes a proposal, responds to press, or chooses a font for a slide deck, they are making brand decisions. If there is no clear reference, they guess, and over time the brand drifts.

A brand guide captures the visible things (logotype, color palette, typefaces, image style) and the less visible things (tone of voice, the words you use and avoid, how you talk about what you do). Both matter. A company with a beautiful logo and an inconsistent voice still feels disorganized to the people who encounter it.

The goal is not a thick document nobody reads. It is a short, findable reference that answers the most common questions and makes it easy to stay consistent without having to ask someone.

What to capture

For this part of the company brain, what is worth writing down and keeping current. The goal is not a complete archive but a living record that new people can read and returning people can trust.

Logo & visual assets

Store the current logo files (in all formats you use) and the rules for how they should and should not appear. Include color codes, typeface names and sources, and a link to where the assets live.

Tone of voice

Write down how the brand sounds: the register it uses, the words it favors, and a few examples of on-brand and off-brand copy. This is the piece most often skipped and most often needed.

Brand story & positioning

Capture the one-paragraph version of what the company is, who it is for, and why it exists in its own words. This is the text that gets adapted for pitches, bios, and website copy.

Sub-brands & variants

If you have more than one brand, product line, or market-specific identity, note what each one is called, how it relates to the parent brand, and where its assets live.

Questions to explore

Use these on your own or in a group. There are no right answers, only better conversations.

Where do people currently go when they need a logo or brand asset, and how reliable is that place?
What does the brand sound like, and is that actually written down anywhere?
Who is responsible for keeping the brand guide current when things change?
Are there sub-brands or product-specific identities that need their own documentation?
What are the most common brand mistakes you see inside the organization, and would a reference document prevent them?

Things to notice

A brand guide that lives only in a designer's head (or an old Dropbox folder nobody updates) provides almost no protection against drift.
Tone of voice is frequently left out of brand documentation because it is harder to write down than colors and fonts, but it is often the thing that most defines how a brand feels.
If the brand guide has never been shared with sales, support, or operations teams, it is not functioning as a company-wide reference.