Stages of developing a brand book from scratch

Where to start: with strategy or with visuals

The correct order is to start with meanings, then form. First, positioning, values, communication tone, target audience, and competitive field are established — what is called the brand platform. Only after that does it make sense to draw a logo and select colors, because visual solutions should express an already formulated idea, not replace it.

If you skip the strategic stage, you get exactly the situation described in the introduction: a beautiful but meaningless document. The designer doesn't know why a particular font was chosen, the marketing department cannot explain the brand's 'voice' to clients, and a new employee, opening the brand book, sees rules for logo placement on business cards but nothing about why the company exists at all or how it should communicate with its audience. A visual style without a platform is packaging without content.

Logobook, guideline, or full brand book — what you need

These three documents are often confused, but they solve different tasks and cost different amounts.

A telling contrast: in Russian Railways, the brand style guide occupies more than 160 pages — there are dozens of types of transport, staff uniforms, and station navigation. At 'The Crossroads,' the logo usage rules fit into 20 pages — the network does not require the level of detail found in railway documentation. The document's scale is determined not by ambition, but by the actual complexity of the business.

How to gather information for a brand book

Before opening a graphic editor, one must finalize the technical specification. Without it, the designer works by guesswork, and the client receives what is 'pretty' but not what is needed.

Before launching, the following must be ready:

• a finalized logo (verified, not a draft version);
• a defined color palette;
• selected fonts for digital and print;
• a photo style — 10-15 references that show the mood, not just 'pretty photos';
• tone of voice rules — how the brand speaks: formally, friendly, with humor;
• a formulated brand strategy — positioning, values, brand promise.

An often-skipped step is interviewing the team. It's worth talking not only with the leadership but also with sales, support, and HR: they each day broadcast the brand outward and know where current rules (if any) are not working. Good questions for such an interview: 'What do customers say about us most often?', 'What phrase would you never say on behalf of the company?', 'Which competitor irritates you most and why?' The answers provide more material for the brand platform than any brief.

And before including the logo in the final document, it must be checked for registrability: over 90% of trademark applications at Rospatent are rejected due to similarity with already registered marks. It's cheaper to check this at the start than to redo the brand book after a refusal to register.

Stages of development: from brief to implementation

1. Information gathering: team interviews, competitor analysis, audit of current materials.
2. Formulation of the brand platform: positioning, values, mission, tone of voice.
3. Logo development or revision, if it does not yet exist or requires revision.
4. Building the visual system: RGB/HEX palette for digital, CMYK for print, and Pantone for exact matching at the printing house; font pair; graphic elements.
5. Assembly of the document structure and writing of application rules on real company carriers — not abstract business cards, but specific macetah of the website, packaging, presentations.
6. Testing: give the document to an employee who did not participate in the development and see if he or she can independently compile a presentation according to the rules.
7. Implementation: a short presentation for the team, not just a file sent by email.

The duration of such work in Russia is from 3 to 8 weeks, and the cost depends heavily on the volume: the basic version costs 150 000–700 000 ₽, a comprehensive project with a strategy and a branched system of carriers can cost from 2 million ₽ and up.

Why brandbooks are not used in practice

Design is almost never the main reason here. The document is abandoned for other reasons.

• It is made 'for the future', without real discussion with the team — people do not feel the document as their own and simply ignore it.
• Inside only design rules without a meaningful platform — employees do not understand why they should follow the format if it is not explained what stands behind it.
• The manager himself does not believe in the formulated values — if the founder says one thing at meetings and something else in the brandbook, the document dies in the first week.
• The volume is too large: a 80-page monument nobody opens a second time. The recommended reference is not more than 35 pages for the main version, the rest can be moved to appendices for narrow specialists.

Living brandbook: update and format

A brandbook is not a memory document, but a working tool, and it should be treated as a product that develops together with the company. It is worth reviewing it entirely once every 2-3 years or when there are noticeable changes — rebranding, entering a new market, launching a new direction. Point updates — new carriers, updated templates — are more logical to introduce as they appear, not waiting for a major review.

Format matters no less than content. Static PDF is good for legal fixation of rules, but does not live well in daily team work: it is difficult to update, versions diverge, designers edit local copies. Working practice — to maintain an up-to-date version in Figma or a similar system with access rights, where changes are visible to everyone at once, and generate PDF as a 'snapshot' for external contractors or partners. Thus the document remains a living tool, not an archival file that is opened once when signing a contract with a design studio.

If you plan to assign the project to an agency, please check the stages and components of brandbook development in Gromov Branding: the service page collects the work process, examples of documents, and a form for discussing the task.