Brand Guidelines Template

Trying to build brand consistency without a central source of truth is like trying to solve a Rubik’s cube while the colors constantly change. But there’s good news. You can save your team’s time, energy, and resources — and maintain brand consistency — from one centralized location. 

Our brand guidelines template has all of the key components you’ll need to achieve a beautifully designed brand book cover to cover. Your team can use this brand bible template to ensure every component they produce has the attention to detail it deserves. What’s even better? The free brand guidelines template fully integrates with your existing workflow automation in Slack.  

The benefits of our brand identity guidelines template

For companies, creating a brand bible is the key to aligning marketing, sales, and product teams, making it essential to have a clear, company-wide perspective.

However, building a consistent brand identity is composed of many documents. With a brand identity guide template, your business can create and maintain a professional brand by ensuring all the essential elements of your brand are well documented and in one place. 

And with the brand identity guidelines template from Slack, companies now have the recipe for continuous success across teams. No more time-consuming searches through siloed brand assets with the hope of finding the most recent design assets, mood boards, or style guides — just a centralized hub dedicated to the creation of your team’s polished deliverables.

Unified brand communication

The brand guidelines template from Slack is a simple and easy-to-use solution for creating and distributing your brand guidelines within your organization. This brand book template is designed to consolidate all your guidelines in one place, ensuring everyone on your team can reference and adhere to your brand’s visual identity and communication standards. 

By having a single source of truth, you ensure a consistent brand representation across all platforms and materials, helping you sustainably build your brand and enhance its look and feel. This approach ensures that your brand identity is cohesive and professional across every piece of content, whether digital or print.

Customizable guidelines template

This brand identity guidelines template comes equipped with a customizable canvas with all the essential design elements. You can easily add your specific brand identity details, making it an easy-to-follow resource for your team. This allows you to tailor your brand style guide to fit your brand’s unique identity without starting from scratch. Define crucial elements of your brand, from logo usage and color palettes to typography, tone of voice, and brand values. This brand guide template allows you to create a visually unified brand presence across all assets, helping your team maintain alignment in every project.

Streamline office hours requests

Even with streamlined guidelines, people always have questions. To further enhance communication and efficiency, this template includes a “Book Office Hours” workflow. This feature simplifies how team members request and receive approval or clarification on brand-related queries. By scheduling dedicated times for discussion, your team can ensure that all brand questions are addressed promptly and accurately, reducing delays and misunderstandings in project execution. The office hours feature provides a structured approach to helping your team stay on track with your brand style and visual identity.

Keep track of office hours discussions

Make it easy for people to find answers by keeping track of what’s discussed in the Office Hours Topics list. Requests are automatically added as they come in, and you can add notes and decisions for reference later. This organized approach saves time and enhances the effectiveness of your brand guidelines strategy. By maintaining a brand guidelines presentation that’s easy to navigate, your team can quickly use this information in future projects, ensuring clarity and consistency in your brand’s identity.

Enhance employee onboarding

It’s crucial to communicate your business brand guidelines to employees from day one so they can see exactly how to represent the brand in their future work. This free brand style guide template will help you present your brand’s identity in the clearest, most consistent way possible during onboarding. Clearly illustrate your guidelines in a simple brand guideline template rather than just hoping your new employees get a strong sense of your brand’s identity in conversation. 

6 steps to creating a brand standards template

If you’re not sure where to get started creating your own brand standards, we’ve outlined the key steps to developing your own.

1. Designate a central workspace for communications

The best way to start curating your brand standards template is to use a central platform that facilitates collaboration and streamlines access and distribution. Once you’ve established the central workspace for communications, it’s time to start defining the key components of your brand guidelines. 

From this central workspace, you should be able to:

• Track ongoing communications
• Securely share files
• Enable real-time responsiveness
• Sync with other software
• Automate workflows
• Provide searchable documentation and communications
• Provide dynamic formats for communication such as video and voice recordings, reactions, and polling

2. Establish the foundational elements of your brand

The first thing you need to make clear in your brand guidelines is the foundation upon which your brand stands, including:

• Mission and vision: The big, bold, north-star statement that guides your organization.

• Brand story: The narrative you tell about your brand’s purpose, curated to build an emotional connection with your consumers. This may include some history about why the organization was founded and how the goods or services you sell will improve the lives of your customers.

• Brand values: These are the principles that guide and enforce everything that’s done at the organization. You may think of them as the pillars or principles on which your mission and vision rests.

• Brand architecture: This is the framework that defines relationships between brands, product lines, and partnerships within the organization. 

A great way to effectively tell the story of these foundational elements is through recording a video for the template canvas, right in Slack. To reinforce key elements, you can also include text on the page with a summary.

3. Define the visual identity of your brand

The key to building a strong brand identity is consistency, especially when it comes to visual elements that consumers use to recognize and develop an affinity for your product. Defining this visual identity for stakeholders in your brand guidelines is crucial. If inconsistencies arise, people might use outdated design elements or face delays while waiting for clarification on how to apply the brand correctly.

Some of the key elements of your visual identity guidelines should include:

• Logos 
• Brand colors
• Brand fonts
• Other design elements like iconography
• Guidelines for use like spacing, minimum size, and primary and secondary assets

Within Slack, your team can easily add these creative assets as images or links to files in the canvas of your brand guidelines template.

4. Describe your brand communication style

Just like you can recognize loved ones by hearing their voice, consumers will come to associate your brand with your communication style. But they won’t be able to develop that affinity if your brand style changes with each point of contact. That’s why it’s so important to clearly describe your brand’s communication style in your brand guidelines.

The two essential elements of your brand’s communication style guide should include:

• Brand voice and language: The personality of your brand, expressed in the phrasing, formality, and word choice used.

• Grammatical standards: These are the standards for how you format written communications, including — but not limited to — syntax and punctuation.

With the brand guidelines template from Slack, you can easily create tables, graphs and charts that illustrate preferred language at a glance. To develop a consistent brand image that resonates with your target audience, you can also list key elements of your brand’s voice and tone, and define the personality traits of your brand’s persona.

5. Include support resources

To triage brand requests and help teams across the company find answers on their own, make sure you provide support resources in your guidelines. 

Some of the resources you may want to consider including are:

• Brand design templates for repeat use cases like social media posts, email newsletters, etc.
• Training workflows that walk your new hires through the materials
• A list of tools your team has access to for aiding in branded deliverables such as grammar checkers, design software, etc.
• An office hours request form to funnel any unanswered questions into an easily trackable Office Hours Topic List

6. Provide a clear asset management process

The last thing you want is for your brand guide to deteriorate over time due to a lack of updates. That’s why it’s so important to have a clear process for managing and updating brand assets and guides. 

These instructions may include:

• Contact information for your brand manager
• Correction protocols 
• Review and approval processes
• Compliance checkpoints
• Brand audit guidelines 
• Quality assurance procedures
• Asset request form (to submit requests for revised, updated, or new assets)