Brand guidelines

Brand guidelines define what the brand stands for and how it should be expressed across every touchpoint: logo, colour, typography, photography, illustration, voice and tone. They're authored once, shared across marketing, product and partners, and they sit upstream of any design system — see our deep dive on what brand guidelines are and why you need them.

Where they overlap with a design system is the visual layer: brand defines the colour palette, the system implements it as tokens and foundations. A common mistake is treating them as the same thing — they aren't. Brand guidelines tell the design system what to be; the design system makes that real in product code. We help teams join the two up via our brand and identity work.

Related: Style guide · Design system · Foundations · Design principles