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Designers know the ins and outs of developing new assets for an existing brand. But remaining consistent and innovative simultaneously can be a challenging, and often impossible task without a brand kit, which details a company’s style guidelines, including fonts, colors, imagery, feel, and more.
For business owners, having a comprehensive brand kit is essential to communicating their ideas better with designers, saving precious time and resources.
But how does a branding kit look, and how do you create one? Our branding experts answer these questions in the article below.
Table of Contents
What Is a Branding Kit?
A branding kit showcases all of your company’s brand elements, including logos, fonts, and colors that form its visual identity. Having a branding kit helps create consistency across all visuals and marketing materials, which can, in some cases, boost revenue by 23%, according to statistical data.
The phrases brand kit and style guide are often used interchangeably, and while they are similar, they both serve a different purpose at the different stages of the branding process. Brand kits are comprehensive collections of visual elements that represent your brand, including your logo, graphic elements, typography, and color palette. The purpose of a brand kit is to help marketers and designers use the correct visual assets when creating marketing materials.
Style guides are more detailed documents that usually lay down the ground rules for brands to maintain consistency across all communications and creative materials. They highlight things such as image usage, tone of voice, social media presence guidelines, messaging basics, and more. Style guides serve as reference tools used by all creative teams (such as copywriters or designers) to create not just branded materials but handle communication too.
Simply put, branding kits aim to capture the visual identity of your brand, while style guides are more comprehensive.
Brand Kit Elements
Brand kits will usually contain and define the following elements of a brand’s visual identity:
- Photography: These are the types of photos and images your brand uses. For example, they can be either candid shots or staged photos, black-and-white or color photos, etc.
- Color scheme: Your brand kit’s color scheme will have the list of hex codes that designers need for your primary and secondary color schemes.
- Logo: You may have different logo treatments for different formats. Some might include the full name of your company with the logo or a shortened version, with a single letter. In either case, your brand kit will help designers understand how they can communicate your brand’s message through your preferred ways of logo design.
- Typeface and fonts: Brand fonts will often be custom that designers create just for a given brand to set the tone and style of the company. In turn, a brand kit will often include the drives for downloading your typography design and will also have instructions on kerning, tracking, and leading (treating text space).
- Branding kit template: Templates for social posts, email newsletters, and print materials give designers additional structure to create branded materials.
How To Create a Brand Kit
As mentioned above, brand kits usually contain all desired design choices for your brand in detail. Below, we explore the step-by-step process of creating a brand kit.
Start With the Story
Your kit should contain your brand’s story. Before getting into the details of color schemes and design elements, take a quick look at your style guide or mission statements. Place your statement into the kit, as this information will give designers a better foundation for understanding your brand and help them develop a stronger sense of what the upcoming designs should look like.
Talk About Brand Voice
While tone of voice and written communication aren’t really a part of brand kits, sharing the general dos and don'ts pertaining to ads, image captions, and other forms of content can help designers better understand your brand’s voice, which will also impact future visual assets.
Showcase Different Logo Variations
Experts at design companies know that your logo will have to fit into every marketing material — square and round, tall and wide. That said, ensure that you showcase the adaptability of your logo. This will let designers see all the different iterations you have. This may also help them come up with new possible versions or iterations, or at least, brainstorm ideas.
Before the internet, business owners knew that their logo would have to look great in print, on billboards, and eventually, on TV. Now, there are more platforms and more formats, from social media flyers to branded AR filters, meaning that there might be room for even more logo iterations down the line.
Include Typography
We’ve talked about incorporating fonts, letter and word spacing above. Explaining the reason behind your font selection and how you aim to integrate written content into your visual designs is essential.
Include the Brand’s Color Palette
Most brands will have primary, secondary, or even tertiary logo colors. You should also include the different color swatches that define the feel and look of your brand. Just like with logo iterations, make sure to include several swatches of your primary and secondary colors (with examples of already completed visual assets) for your designers so they can better understand what they are working with now and in the future.
Benefits of Brand Kits
A well-structured branding kit means more than having a document of your brand's visual information ready for designers. It also brings several benefits that can impact your company positively:
- Improved brand consistency: A comprehensive branding kit ensures that your visual elements are consistent across your marketing assets, boosting brand recognition.
- Better brand awareness: A consistent visual identity helps establish your brand as a more memorable personality which can directly translate into a better chance of grabbing the attention of your audience, and potentially retaining it too.
- Save time: Having a brand kit can speed up the process of creating deliverables. Some predesigned assets will already be available for designers, and no one will have to recreate each brand element.
Brand Kit Examples from Successful Companies
Below, we delve into the best examples of brand kits from companies that have successfully created consistent and powerful brands over the years.
Netflix
Netflix uses its bold “Netflix Red” color not just to make a statement, but to create a trademark visual tradition too.
The streaming company’s branding is straightforward, almost exclusively using its “N” or “Netflix” logos in red. It also usually uses the red logos against a contrasting black background, adding a certain cinematic feel to the brand and its website. If the background isn’t black, the brand will opt for another contrasting color that doesn’t impair readability.
Slack
Slack is another international brand with an instantly recognizable visual identity. Its branding guidelines cover almost everything in a 50-slide presentation on its media kit page.
In addition to the general visual guidelines related to fonts, logos, and colors, Slack also offers downloadable photos of their executives and office for media use. This is an effective move to help the company gain better control over the imagery others use to present and talk about it, truly enhancing consistency.
As a social platform, LinkedIn is focusing more on accessibility, meaning that its signature blue shade has become more of a complementary color, emphasizing warmth, support, and inclusivity.
The company’s online brand kit and guidelines start by introducing LinkedIn’s brief history and how the brand has changed throughout the years, which is a useful tip to follow.
Branding Kit Takeaways
A strong branding kit enables you to achieve greater consistency regarding your visuals and other marketing assets, helping your designers better understand your brand and preferences for future materials. Just like style guides and brand guides, a brand kit is an essential document that lays down the foundation of your company’s identity and serves as a starting point for creating captivating campaigns.
Branding Kit FAQs
What do branding kits include, and how much do they cost?
Usually, branding kits will include color schemes, logo sets, front pairings, and guidelines to help designers better understand your brand’s visual style. Hiring a design agency or a designer can cost anywhere between $1000 and $10,000 based on different factors.
However, there are online tools and different platforms that may offer free services.
How many colors should my brand have?
Ideally, designers will recommend having no more than three to five colors in your branding kit, but there’s no exact, or magic number. If you find that you need more colors, have your designers extract them from the original color set established in your strategy.
What are brand templates?
Brand templates are reusable presentations, graphics, or documents with your branding assets incorporated into the layout. These templates can be reused for new projects and presentations as many times as you like, helping you maintain brand consistency without any additional effort.
