The short version
- A brand kit's job is consistency under delegation — so other people can make things that look right.
- You need eight things, not sixty pages.
- Colour needs a system with roles, not a row of swatches.
- Templates are the part that actually gets used. Build them.
- Ship a working kit and refine it. A perfect kit that arrives in month four is worthless.
Most small businesses do not have a branding problem. They have a delegation problem. The owner knows what looks right. Nobody else does. So the moment a second person starts making content, everything drifts — a different blue, a different font, a slightly different logo lifted from a WhatsApp forward.
A brand kit is the fix. Not a sixty-page bible nobody opens. Eight practical things.
1. Logo files, in every format you will actually need
The most common cause of ugly output is that the only logo file anyone has is a low-resolution PNG with a white box behind it.
You need:
- SVG — the master, scales to anything.
- PNG with transparency, at a large size, for everyday use.
- A horizontal lockup and a stacked one. Different spaces need different shapes.
- A mark-only version for profile pictures and favicons.
- Light and dark versions that work on both backgrounds.
- A one-colour version for stamps, embroidery and printing.
Plus one rule written down: the minimum clear space around it, and the minimum size it may be used at.
2. A colour system, with roles
A row of swatches is not a system. Each colour needs a job, otherwise every designer will use them in a different proportion and the brand will feel different every time.
| Role | Job | Roughly how much |
|---|---|---|
| Primary | The brand colour. Headlines, key blocks, buttons. | 20–30% |
| Secondary | Support. Backgrounds, secondary blocks, gradients. | 15–20% |
| Accent | Highlights, tags, small emphasis. Never large areas. | 5–10% |
| Light neutral | The page. Backgrounds, breathing room. | 40–50% |
| Dark neutral | Body text and dark sections. | Text only |
Record every colour as HEX, RGB and CMYK. Print and screen are different worlds and the day you order signage you will need the CMYK values.
Then check contrast. Body text needs a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 against its background. Plenty of otherwise good brand palettes fail this and become genuinely hard to read on a phone in daylight.
3. Two typefaces and a scale
One display face for headlines with personality, one clean face for body text. That is it. Three or more and everything starts looking like a poster from a print shop.
Write down the scale — the actual sizes for H1, H2, H3, body and small text — and the weights allowed. "Use Inter" is not a rule. "Headlines in Bricolage Grotesque 700 with -3% letter spacing, body in Inter 400 at 16px" is.
Pick fonts that are freely licensed and easy for anyone on your team to install. A brand built on a font only the designer owns falls apart the moment they are on leave.
4. A photography and video direction
The most-skipped section, and the one that most affects how the brand actually looks in the feed. Half a page is enough:
- Light: bright and airy, or dark and moody?
- Backgrounds: clean and controlled, or real and in-situ?
- People: always, sometimes, never?
- Angles: overhead, eye-level, macro?
- Colour grade: warm, neutral or cool?
- Three reference images that are unmistakably right, and one that is unmistakably wrong.
That last pair does more than a page of adjectives.
5. Templates — the part that gets used
Guidelines get read once. Templates get used every day. Build the ones a small business actually needs:
- Feed poster, three layouts — announcement, offer, quote.
- Carousel, cover plus inner page.
- Story, two layouts.
- Reel end card.
- Festival poster base.
- WhatsApp status format.
- Invoice or letterhead.
Editable, in a tool your team actually has. A beautiful template in software nobody can open is decoration.
The delegation test
Hand the kit to someone who has never worked on your brand and ask them to make one poster and one story. If what comes back looks right, the kit works. If they have to ask you three questions, those three answers are what is missing from it.
6. Tone of voice, in five lines
Not an essay. Five things:
- Three adjectives for how you sound.
- Three you are definitely not.
- Two example sentences, right and wrong.
- Words you always use — and words you never use.
- How you handle a complaint publicly.
That last one is worth more than the rest combined, because it is the moment the brand is most visible and most easily damaged.
7. Do's and don'ts, with pictures
Six examples of correct use and six of incorrect, shown visually. Stretching the logo, changing its colour, putting it on a busy photo, drop shadows, low-contrast text, four fonts in one poster. People remember pictures of mistakes far better than written rules.
8. One home for all of it
A single shared folder or link containing everything above, with the fonts included. If the logo lives in three WhatsApp threads and an old email, you do not have a brand kit — you have a scavenger hunt.
Build it in a week, use it for a month, then fix what broke. A kit that ships and gets refined beats a perfect one that arrives too late to be used — and the same principle applies to briefing anyone who works on it, which is covered in how to brief a content agency.
Frequently asked questions
Logo files in every needed format, a colour system with defined roles, two typefaces with a scale, a photography and video direction, a set of ready-made templates, tone-of-voice rules, usage do's and don'ts, and a single place where all of it lives.
It is scoped on how far it has to reach — how many applications, how many templates, whether you are building new or rebuilding what exists. Logo-only work is the cheapest version and usually leaves you without the parts that matter day to day: the colour system, the type scale and the templates.
Yes. A logo tells people who you are once. A brand kit is what makes the next two hundred posts look like they came from the same business — which is what actually builds recognition.
One primary, one secondary, one accent, plus a light and a dark neutral. Five is plenty. What matters more than the count is that each colour has a defined job.
Yes, and you probably should refine it after a few months of real use. What you must not do is drift — unplanned change post by post. Deliberate updates, applied everywhere at once, are fine.
We’ll run the whole thing.
Reels, posters, stories, captions, scheduling and posting — concept to published, shot and edited in-house.
