Edward Boatman • May 16th
There’s a lot that comes with establishing a brand, but having a solid foundation underneath your feet will help you narrow in on your brand’s true individualism and offerings.
A brand kit wraps your company’s identity and personality into one perfect bundle. It can help you navigate how to communicate with your clients and target audience.
A brand kit is essential for your business, whether you’re a small, blossoming startup or a midsize company. It’s an opportunity to gather your brand assets and guidelines in one place.
Keep reading to learn more about the purpose of a brand kit, what you should include and great examples of brand style guides.
A brand kit, also known as a brand style guide, will be your go-to guide for your brand’s visual and internal identity. It’s a digital reference book that documents important elements of your brand and how those elements should be used.
A brand kit can be seen as a living document and can come with you wherever you go. Instead of holding onto printed copies of your brand kit, going digital will make sharing your brand easy.
A brand kit is a one-stop authoritative document for all of your brand’s design essentials.
It includes important guidelines that both employed designers and contracted freelancers need when working on internal design projects. A brand kit helps keep all of your company’s design assets as on-brand as possible, from the tone of voice in copy to color palettes.
When thinking through your first brand kit, you can use free tools like the HubSpot Brand Kit Generator until you're ready for something more robust, like the Lingo Digital Brand Guidelines and Brand Hub platform.
If you’re ready to create a brand kit, you’ll need to start with some marketing basics before creating the final product. Use the following steps to build your brand background.
It’s time to really get to know your brand. Your brand isn’t just the product or service you offer — it needs to provide an experience that only your brand can exclusively offer. Ask yourself how you want people to perceive your brand.
Here a few ways to solidify your brand identity:
Once you’ve decided on your ideal customer, you need to understand who your target audience is in depth. The better you know your target consumer, the more successful your marketing tactics will be.
Answer the following questions to define your target audience:
You’ll be able to create personalized messages that your target audience can relate to when you spend time getting to know them better.
Take a peek at your competitors — how are they marketing their products? What digital platforms do they use to connect to their customers? What does their brand identity look like?
By skimming through your competitor’s social media pages, websites and news coverage, you’ll be able to learn more about their marketing strategies and any gaps they may have that you can fill in when creating your brand.
Now that you know your brand identity, target audience and competitors, it’s now time to create your brand story. This will be what you put at the beginning of your brand kit so the reader can quickly understand your brand and its backstory.
Your story should include your brand’s goals, messaging, values and history. Its tone of voice should match your brand’s personality. It should be compelling for both partners and customers alike. Keep it concise, but make sure to include important details the reader should know when they first meet your brand.
There are a few essential items you should include in your brand kit. They’re the necessary tools needed to communicate your brand’s core messages. Below we’ve covered the most important assets to include in your brand identity kit.
Your logo is the centerpiece of your brand. It can be a powerful marketing tool, as it can visually set your brand apart from your competitors.
A logo should reflect your brand positioning and personality. If your brand is geared toward a corporate audience, your logo may be more sophisticated and simple. If your audience is a younger demographic, your logo may be more colorful and youthful.
Font selection is an important part of your brand kit creation, as it can become just as recognizable as your logo. You can choose a previously created font, like Montserrat, or have a type designer design a unique font for your brand.
You’ll likely have two sets of fonts: your main and secondary font types. Your main will be used for larger titles, whereas your secondary will be used for longer copy sections. Work with a graphic designer to find the perfect pair that works with your desired color palette.
A color palette is a set of colors that represents your brand’s personality. It should be well established in your brand kit and woven into various visual assets, like your logo.
A solid color scheme should include both primary and secondary colors. Your chosen color combination should be balanced, whether you choose a pair of contrasting complementary colors or a harmonious set of analogous colors.
Your color palette should make sense with your brand’s offerings and target audience. Stray away from choosing a color palette that’s used by competitors in your market. Your color palette needs to be recognizable, like how cherry red and bright white are instantly tied with the Coca-Cola soda brand.
You can use photos in a brand kit to demonstrate how certain marketing materials should look or to give visual context to your brand’s messaging. A set of well-curated images can be used not only in your brand kit, but also in other components of your branding, like your website homepage.
Invest in a professional photographer to take high-quality photographs of marketing collateral, products or services to use in your brand kit.
Planning to incorporate illustrative design throughout your visual identity? Make sure the illustration style is unique to your brand. The illustration style should work well with your other design components, but also make sense for your brand’s personality.
Your brand kit should include a guide on your desired illustration style, like icons or characteristics. This is helpful if you plan to hire freelance designers to work on future projects, like digital marketing campaigns.
Similar to illustrations, many successful brand kits include an iconography overview that includes where they can be used and download access. Having a unique icon library will make your branding even more distinct and visually appealing. Check out Noun Project’s icon collection for brand inspiration.
It’s easier to understand what a brand kit is when you can see visual examples. That’s why we’ve included some of our favorite brand style guides below to give you a picture of what yours can look like.
Nagarro, an IT and digital product engineering company, does a great job with their brand kit for a couple of reasons. In the beginning, they give a thorough brand introduction plus explain how to use the brand kit. This is helpful from a legal standpoint, which they also touch on at the end of the guide.
For design, they have multiple tabs that include different versions of their logo, various icon work and how to use these designs correctly. Nagarro even includes a “Music” tab that covers music representative of the brand in case music is needed for a project.
Unique brand kit elements:
Uberflip is a content experience platform for businesses looking to improve their customer engagement and ROI. Right off the bat in an “Our name” section of their brand kit, Uberflip explains their name and how it should be correctly spelled out. Uberflip chose to go in depth on design guidelines, including color palette, typography, photography and iconography.
Uberflip also added examples of what their marketing collateral should look like, like a business card and email signature. These are small but important details that help keep the brand looking cohesive across all components.
Unique brand kit elements:
Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine is a well-known cancer research and treatment institute, so their brand kit needed to reflect that same high level of sophistication. The logo for the Ellison Institute is an illustrative icon, so the brand kit includes a tab explaining the intricate meanings of the icon and how it connects to the institute’s brand values and mission.
The brand guide includes downloadable images of maps and building plan diagrams, which is helpful for designers working on a funding campaign or brochure. To stay on-brand with remote work, the brand kit even includes a universal Zoom background used by all Ellison employees.
Unique brand kit elements:
To have a successful brand kit, your digital assets and guidelines should tell a complete story of your brand. To create your brand style guide, check out Lingo’s pricing options.