After carrying out research and analysis of various banking brands and banking app design patterns across the industry, I am now well advanced and ready to begin designing a set of brand guidelines for Square, my banking brand. Creating well-defined brand guidelines is absolutely crucial at this stage, as they serve as the foundation for all forms of communication and customer engagement ranging from digital platforms and mobile applications to marketing materials and direct customer interactions. These guidelines will play an essential role in maintaining consistency across all customer touch points, from the first impression to ongoing relationships. By establishing and following these guidelines, I can ensure Square evolves into a distinctive and memorable brand that customers instantly recognise.
Brand guidelines are the foundation of a brand's identity, ensuring consistency, recognition, and professionalism across all customer touch points. These guidelines serve as a rulebook that dictates how a brand presents itself visually and verbally, covering essential elements like colour, logo, typography, personality, and tone of voice. A well-structured brand guideline document ensures that every interaction, whether digital or physical, aligns with the brand's core identity and values. A typical brand guideline can contain some of the following information about the brand:
These guidelines usually include key elements that represent a brand such as their logo and how it should or shouldn’t be used, the brands colour scheme, typography choice, imagery used, layout schemes and their mission statement. They can also cover areas including none visual elements like the brand’s tone of voice, brand values and how they communicate with its target audience in a way that feels close and trustworthy. Some guidelines can go into deeper detail including breakdowns of their standards, what is expected of their brand and how to handle co branding. For a brand, especially a new one like mine, having clear guidelines is essential. They help create a consistent look and fell that builds recognition and trust amongst its users. In a world like ours where users interact with brands through social media, websites, mobile apps and emails, consistency is what makes a brand feel professional and real. Without these guidelines, a brand risks becoming visually lost in personality, which can confuse users and weaken its identity. With this, I began breaking down what brand guidelines are and getting an understanding as to what different categories of the guidelines mean and how they are applied:
Includes a variety of primary and secondary logo variations for that brand, including acceptable colour variations. There should also be rules on the minimum size, clearing space and incorrect usage to ensure legibility and consistency throughout. Guidelines for the logo should appear on different backgrounds as well as in different formats for more variety to work with.
The inclusion of a valid primary colour scheme that reflects on the brand’s personality, often including a firm colour choice such as blue, red, green and secondary colours for colour contrast. Recognition of colour combinations too to maintain consistency in marketing features and physical branding too.
The use of a primary font choice for headlines and body text, ensuring a professional, modern and legible look to the brand identity. Alternative fonts used for both digital and physical applications as well for fallback options. A set amount of guideline rules on specific spacing, alignment and weight for maintaining a polished and clean presentation of text.
What key messaging principles are needed and defining whether the brand’s voice is going to be friendly, formal or approachable. Guidelines for customer communication as well such as templates for emails, social media and advertising. An inclusion on rules for avoiding jargon and using clear, transparent language for the user experience.
Information about approved styles of photography including tone. Iconography and graphical elements that align with the given brand’s personality. A set of guidelines that depict what illustrations, textures or patterns can or can’t be used in both the design and marketing for that brand.
By establishing a strong and informative brand guidelines document, my banking brand Square can reinforce its position in the banking industry as a brand that new and existing customers can rely on, trust and most obviously, being easily recognisable to the eye anywhere.
Before I go ahead and begin looking at everything relevant to brand guidelines, I felt it was best that beforehand I developed a stronger understanding of how brand guidelines are structured, applied and used to shape a brand’s identity. I wanted to look at existing brands with well established identities as this will allow me to gain insights to the systems that support their visuals, tone of voice and user experience. This research will also help me understand how guidelines are more than just rules a company has to follow, they are in fact tools used for building trust, emotion and recognition amongst its users. These examples that I will look at act as creative and practical preferences, offering inspiration I can adapt to suit the specific goals and values I want to achieve with my bank Square.