Visual Guidelines - shaping your brand's visual identity

When it comes to your business growth, branding is a crucial factor that you need to take into account. In this article, we will dive into the details of visual guidelines and explain how you can benefit from them.

What are Visual Guidelines?

Let's start with a simple fact – visual guidelines are part of a complete branding service. If you are unfamiliar with it, we recommend visiting our dedicated hub, where we describe branding in detail. Now, visual guidelines are vital in shaping the appearance and style of brands and user interfaces. At the same time, those guidelines ensure the graphical consistency of any business across different platforms and communication channels.

Depending on the organisation's specific needs, they can range from detailed brand books to simple style guides. Going further, custom-made guidelines will help design teams stay aligned and speed up the creation of brand materials across all departments. So, if you consider template-based guidelines – do not; they will not perform as effectively as custom ones.

Going further into the definition of visual guidelines, it is essential to mention that they cover your brand's identity by covering things like logo use, colours, fonts, images, and the overall layout for a unified brand look.

Now that you know what it is and what it takes care of, let's jump straight into a little guide on keeping your brand consistent with visual guidelines.

How to keep your brand consistent with Visual Guidelines

Keeping your brand consistent is the main factor in boosting recognition, streamlining design, and enhancing user engagement. To do that smoothly, you need strong visual guidelines to pave the way for a cohesive and memorable brand identity. So, without further ado, let's jump straight into the benefits of visual guidelines for your business.

Consistent branding

Visual guidelines ensure your brand is memorable and recognisable, enhancing brand identity and user trust across various platforms. It is crucial for your brand's success and growth. Ensuring recognition among new potential customers can make your brand stand out and give you a wider audience potentially interested in your products or services.

Streamlined design process

Clear visual guidelines can help designers in their daily work. How? That is really simple – design teams can focus on innovation with clear visual standards rather than deliberating over visual details. Setting these visual standards speeds up the design process and maintains project consistency.

Enhanced user experience

How about creating a more intuitive and enjoyable user experience? Not a problem – you can achieve that by unified and thoughtfully designed visual elements. This factor increases user engagement and satisfaction and fosters loyalty and trust in your brand.

Effective implementation

It is crucial to remember that the visual guidelines act as a structured framework for designers, streamlining the design and implementation processes to ensure every visual element consistently reflects the brand's vision and objectives.

Versatility across platforms

Here, a key characteristic of visual guidelines is that they are crafted to be adaptable across various platforms and devices, ensuring that the brand's visual identity is preserved and effective regardless of how or where you use it. So, once crafted, you do not have to worry about making any adjustments when working on a different project on a different platform. It is an all-in-one guide that sets the standards for your brand's identity.

Guided decision-making

Ever had a situation when starting a new project or implementing new updates and did not know how to make all the decisions or even where to start? That is no longer a thing with visual guidelines. They provide:

• A reference point.
• Making the decision-making process easier for designers and brand managers.
• Ensuring consistency in future developments.

Improved brand communication

Going further, using visuals that resonate with your target audience helps communicate the brand's message more effectively, improving the overall impact of your efforts. That is precisely what visual guidelines allow you to do – creating visuals that will engage with your audience is easier with clear standards and reference points.

Simplified rebranding or updating

Updating or even rebranding your brand's look may happen when you least expect it. That is why it is crucial to remember visual guidelines that help keep the process smooth and uniform. Moreover, these guidelines ensure that the brand's main values and identity remain unchanged. So, keep it in mind when considering rebranding your business to ensure the whole process will go smoothly.

Our approach to visual guidelines

Now, let us introduce you to how we can take care of previously described guidelines as a part of a branding service. At Flying Bisons, we see visual guidelines as a comprehensive set of rules determining the look and feel of a user interface and brand. This approach ensures not only immediate consistency and unity but also a future-proof direction for other designers and the brand itself – at the same time, avoiding the introduction of conflicting visual solutions or communications. To give you a broader perspective, here are some crucial parts of our process when working on visual guidelines for our clients.

Thorough research

As the first step in the process, we conduct an in-depth analysis of your brand, the market, competitors and the target audience. This way, we get an understanding of your brand's unique value position and the visual expectations of your potential clients.

Brand goal alignment

What might be crucial for you is that we consider your voice in the process. What it means is that we align the visual strategy with your brand's goals and values. But why do we do that? Well, the reason is pretty simple – this ensures that the guidelines we develop are not just aesthetically pleasing but also reflect your business goals.

Development of key visuals

After the first two steps, our team develops key visuals that act as a foundation for the visual guidelines. These KVs are designed to capture the essence of your brand in a visually impactful way.

Close collaboration and approval

Collaboration is the keyword in this whole process. We want to work closely with you and your team throughout the entire process, seeking feedback and approval at key stages to ensure that the final visual standard will meet your expectations and the vision you had at the very beginning.

Expanding the visual framework

Once key visuals are established and developed, it is time to expand them into a comprehensive set of visual guidelines. So, at this stage, we create a detailed specifications for multiple visual elements:

• Colours
• Fonts
• Typography
• Layouts
• Icons
• And more UI elements

Ensuring flexibility and scalability

If you worry about the ever-evolving market and how our visual guidelines will adapt, you can stop right now. Our visual guidelines are designed to be flexible and scalable, accommodating future growth and changes. This ensures that these guidelines will stay relevant and useful no matter what happens in the future and how technology and market trends evolve.

Documentation and delivery

After creating visual guidelines, we do not want to leave you hanging without resources. That is why we provide a detailed document outlining the visual guidelines for your brand. This document will serve you, your team, and any external partners as a reference, guaranteeing consistency across all future projects.

Implementation support

After the whole process, we also offer a post-delivery service. We support you in implementing previously created guidelines across your various platforms and campaigns, ensuring a smooth transition to the new visual strategy.

Ongoing review and adaptation

We understand that any brand can evolve, which is why we offer ongoing review services to adapt and update visual guidelines as your brand grows and market dynamics change.

Our work

We believe in showcasing our work to those who want to become more familiar with our services or learn more about how we can assist them. That's why we've created a page dedicated solely to the projects we've worked on. So, don’t wait and discover how we've helped multiple businesses using visual guidelines as one of our sub-services.

However, if you are already familiar with our expertise and would like to start a collaboration with us and unleash your company's digital potential, don’t hesitate to send us a message describing your needs.