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What a brand kit is
A brand kit — sometimes called brand guidelines or a style guide — is a document plus a set of files that define how your business looks. It answers practical questions before anyone has to ask them: which logo goes on a dark background, what exact green is ours, which font do we use for headings, how much space goes around the logo.
A brand kit also protects your investment in a logo. Once you have paid for good design, the kit makes sure it is used the way it was intended, whether the next piece is made by your staff, a freelancer, a signage vendor or a marketplace seller creating listing images.
Without one, every new designer, printer and staff member makes their own guesses. Over time the logo gets stretched, colours drift and each piece of material looks slightly different. A brand kit stops that drift and makes new work faster to produce.
Who needs a brand kit
- Growing businesses where several people or agencies create material.
- Multi-branch clinics, coaching institutes and restaurants that need every location to look the same.
- D2C brands working with packaging printers, marketplaces and content creators.
- Manufacturers and exporters preparing for trade fairs, catalogues and international buyers.
- Businesses after a rebrand that need the new look applied correctly everywhere.
A useful test: if you have ever received a banner, box or presentation from a vendor and thought “that’s not quite our colour” or “why is the logo squashed”, a brand kit would have prevented it. The more people and suppliers involved, the more it pays off.
What’s inside the kit
- Logo system: primary logo, alternate layouts, icon, one-colour and reversed versions, with clear-space and minimum-size rules.
- Colour palette: primary and secondary colours with CMYK values for print and RGB/HEX values for screen, plus guidance on how much of each to use.
- Typography: heading and body typefaces, fallback fonts for everyday documents, and a simple hierarchy of sizes.
- Imagery style: the kind of photos, icons or illustrations that suit the brand.
- Do’s and don’ts: visual examples of correct and incorrect use.
- Sample applications: how the brand looks on a social post, business card, letterhead or signboard.
Everything is delivered as a PDF guide plus source files organised by format — vector logos, PNGs, font information and colour swatches — so anyone can find what they need quickly.
How we build it
- Audit: we review your existing logo and material to see what is working and what is inconsistent.
- Foundations: we finalise or refine the logo, then define the colour palette and typefaces.
- Rules and examples: we write clear usage rules and design sample applications to show them in action.
- Review: you review the draft guide; we revise until the rules match how your team actually works.
- Handover: the final PDF and organised source files are delivered, ready to share with staff and suppliers.
Tools and formats
We build logo artwork in Adobe Illustrator, lay out the guide in Adobe InDesign or Figma, and can set up a Canva brand kit with your colours, fonts and templates if your team creates everyday material there. Fonts are chosen with licensing in mind: we note whether each one is free for commercial use or needs a licence, and suggest free alternatives for everyday documents where needed.
What affects timeline and cost
- Whether the logo exists or needs to be designed first as part of logo design.
- Depth of the guide: a compact essentials kit is quicker than full guidelines covering signage, vehicles and packaging.
- Number of sample applications and templates included.
- Stakeholders: more decision-makers usually means more review time.
We usually recommend starting with a compact kit covering the essentials and expanding it later as new needs appear, such as vehicle graphics or packaging rules. That keeps the first version quick to produce and easy for your team to adopt.
Common mistakes
- Defining only screen colours, then finding print colours look different.
- Choosing brand fonts that staff cannot use in Word or Google Docs, with no fallback specified.
- Making the guide so long and abstract that nobody follows it.
- Keeping files scattered across email threads instead of one organised folder.
Frequently asked questions
Who should receive the brand kit?
Anyone who creates material for you: staff who make documents or posts, printers, signage vendors, packaging suppliers, agencies and freelancers. Sharing it at the start of every job avoids most consistency problems.
What’s the difference between a logo and a brand kit?
The logo is one element. A brand kit adds the colours, fonts, imagery style and rules for using all of them together, so everything you produce looks consistent.
Can you create a brand kit around my existing logo?
Yes. If your logo works well, we build the kit around it. If it has technical problems, such as no vector file, we can redraw it first.
Will my team be able to use it in Canva?
Yes. We can set up your colours, fonts and key templates in Canva so everyday material stays on-brand.
Do I need a brand kit if I’m a small business?
A compact version is useful even for small teams. It saves time every time you brief a printer, designer or new staff member.
Talk to us about brand kit design
Logo, colour palette, typography and usage rules in one kit, so every piece of work looks consistent.