7 Logo Laws You Don’t Want To Break: Your B2B Brand Identity Standards Guide

Download the 7 LOGO LAWS Infographic Below!

Why you need a Brand Identity Standards Guide.

Your brand deserves careful protection, and your Brand Identity Standards Guide provides the roadmap for doing just that. To maintain a professional and consistent brand identity, you need the 7 Logo Laws. Don’t break them! These Logo Laws are a foundational part of your Brand Identity Standards Guide.

This guide will explore the importance of developing and implementing a Brand Identity Standards Guide, a critical tool for safeguarding your brand’s integrity and maximizing its impact.

Why is a Brand Identity Standards Guide essential for your B2B brand?

• Build Trust: Consistent use of your brand elements creates a sense of reliability and trustworthiness.
• Enhance Brand Recognition: A consistent brand identity makes your brand easier to recognize and recall, leading to greater brand awareness.
• Save Time and Money: Establishing clear guidelines will prevent costly mistakes and waste of resources on inconsistent materials.
• Protect Your Brand: A well-defined Brand Identity Standards Guide safeguards your brand’s integrity and prevents misuse of your brand elements.

Your logo is the face of your company.

In the same way that the name and face identify a person, a name and logo identify the brand.

The logo is one piece of the brand pie, yet it has a critically important role. Yes, logos can suffer from abuse and neglect. Your business will suffer if you do not consistently maintain your brand identity. Your brand identity standards guide will equip you to guard your logo everywhere it’s used.

A strong brand image is essential for attracting customers, building trust, and driving revenue. Your logo is the cornerstone of your visual identity, and its consistent and professional implementation is crucial to your brand’s success.

The two goals of branding are to build trust and be remembered. Building trust requires time and consistency, and a brand can be remembered for the wrong reasons, which poisons trust. Inconsistent logo and style use is one of the most significant contributors to bruising a brand’s credibility.

Consistency, consistency, consistency!

Consistency is the king of Logo Law. Your logo is at the forefront of your brand.

Consistency is a branding no-brainer, but many logo designers miss this part. Unless a brand identity standards guide is created for how your logo will be implemented, your brand will face an uphill battle for years to come.

A Cautionary Branding Tale

A local business spent over $20,000 on a sign for their building. Only after it was installed, the marketing director saw that the sign company had modified the logo with the wrong font! 

Even if it was only a subtle difference, it’s this kind of chipping away at logo law consistency that bruises your brand’s credibility.

Can you imagine Tesla, or any major brand letting a sign company alter its logo font?

Wrong Tesla Font

Correct Tesla Font

Take inventory. Does everything that displays your logo maintain consistency?

Without a brand identity standards guide (and a team that maintains the brand design integrity), incremental changes will creep in. Take a close look: Do your digital stationery, email signatures, print collateral, signs, and truck graphics have variations in color, font, and even your logo?

Well-intentioned Logo Lawbreakers:

• Employees who paste a low-res JPEG of your logo on documents.
• People who stretch your logo or use a low-resolution logo file that results in a blurred logo.
• A sales rep uses the wrong logo file in a PowerPoint deck, so your logo suffers the shame of being in a white box on a solid background.
  These logo abuses are a bold sign that your brand identity is being neglected and your brand image is taking a beating.

A Brand Identity Standards Guide: The Logo Law for your brand.

Big brands go to great lengths to protect their brand identity because it matters. Don’t make the grave mistake many small businesses make by neglecting how your logo is used. Get in the game with a Brand Identity Standards Guide.

The Brand Identity Standards Guide lays out the rules for the use of your logo. (It’s also known as a Brand Guide, Identity Standards, Brand Style Guide, Standards Guide, or Identity Standards.)

The guide is the tool you need to protect your brand’s professional look.
Any business that means business will do what it takes to keep its logo law for a consistent brand identity.

The seven most important Logo Laws in a Brand Identity Standards Guide.

1 – THE LOGO DESCRIPTION: Your Symbol’s Story

A brand is created and sustained by a unique group of people. It’s more than just a name or a logo. Your brand has a distinct personality, idiosyncrasies, and style. Your logo symbolizes the amazing value you bring to the world. The Logo Description tells that story.

Your Logo Symbol Story (see more examples here) is a brief explanation of the meaning behind the logo. A thoughtfully developed brand identity possesses meaning. Succinctly telling the story here equips the brand managers to convey the depth of the brand identity within and without the organization. Your brand story instills an appreciation for its value.

For example, here’s the description of the Identity Creative brand identity:
The Identity Creative company brand identity is a symbol and name logo design style. The sophisticated but friendly uppercase Trebuchet font, used for IDENTITY, compliments the uppercase Garamond Narrow CREATIVE subtext and provides a balanced font foundation. 

The unique two-part, two-color “I” and “C” symbol represents the left and right sides of the brain, as well as the two aspects of a brand: design and messaging.

This communicates the idea of a process that creates a unified and impactful brand impression.
Identity Creative’s purpose is to identify the unique value in every brand and connect it with the people it seeks to serve. This composition of graphic and typographical elements creates a unique impression. It tells the story of what Identity Creative does to fulfill its purpose in the world.

A  company logo that helps tell the brand story deserves to be known. The standards guide sets that standard.

2 – LOGO ORIENTATIONS

Your logo will need to fit into a variety of spaces and a plethora of media applications. A mistake often made by small business brands is that they don’t plan for this.

Whether it’s on a pen, a mug, a billboard, or a social media post, your logo will need to conform to the space restrictions of that application. These include vertical and horizontal constraints.

To account for this, the appropriate logo file types need to be created in various logo orientations. The Brand Identity Standards Guide displays the PRIMARY logo orientation, which is the first one used for general purposes.

If logo orientations are not established when it is created, a well-meaning employee or vendor will create their own interpretation of your logo to fit the space they need. That’s where the trouble comes in.

A Cautionary Branding Tale

One of our clients had a promotional products vendor filling an order for travel mugs. The vendor contacted us to get the original Adobe Illustrator artwork. When questioned why he needed it, said that an intern gave him the horizontal logo and it would not fit the mug.
Sending working files for someone to ‘recreate’ your logo is a no-no!

Our client’s intern sent the wrong logo file. He did not know about the Brand Identity Standards Guide, which showed him how to use the logo. Ouch! We quickly sent over the proper logo file they needed to fit the mug perfectly. This story had a happy ending with marvelous mugs. 

3 – LOGO COLOR FORMULAS

Since the logo will likely be reproduced in a variety of forms, accurate color consistency is a must. To help ensure color consistency across every visual platform, the Brand Identity Standards will include color formulas for each color in the logo.

Color details will include the Pantone Matching System (PMS) colors as a starting point for each color in the logo. These colors are based on the PMS Color Bridge, the color swatch book used as the universal color standard from which the three following color formulas are determined:

CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black): for process printing.
RGB (red, green, and blue): for digital documents, web, and onscreen bitmap viewing.
HTML or HEX: a color code used to replicate a color online.

A comprehensive Brand Identity Standards Guide will also include an extended color scheme. These additional colors are triadic, analogous, or complementary hues based on the logo’s main color. This approach to color science takes into account the harmonic visual relationship these colors will have together in their marketing support applications.

4 – BRAND FONTS

Significant thought has gone into selecting the logo font and its supporting fonts, which complement the font used in your logo.

Logo Font
The font(s) used to create the logo needs to be listed in the Brand Identity Standards Guide. It will also include how it may have been customized to create the logo.

Supporting Fonts
Supporting fonts have been carefully chosen to complement the logo font. Your company font carries a personality and tone. You don’t want employees picking the font-of-the-day to fit their mood when sending your email newsletter or feeling fanciful in their email signature.

Font families are used for marketing and web support and help maintain the personality of your brand.

Font families will include regular, medium, and bold font faces with italicized options for each. The broader the font family, the more versatility for marketing use. You don’t want a zoo of fonts.

By predetermining font parameters, the integrity of your brand identity will be protected. Along with training, well-meaning employees will be stopped from using their personal favorite fonts in your company email signatures and PowerPoint slides. Know your fonts and how to use them with these guidelines for using fonts.)

5 – LOGO PLACEMENT: WHITE SPACE AND REDUCTION LIMITS

Two big issues that often creep into a logo’s use are crowding and over-reduction. Without realizing it, the logo can become encroached upon by text and graphics. White space parameters protect your logo and keep it clean.

The other issue is not realizing the logo can only be reduced to a certain point. When this happens, the details blend into a blob or disappear altogether.

It takes a conscious effort to maintain an invisible fence around the logo, keeping it safe and uncluttered while keeping it big enough to retain detail.

A Cautionary Branding Tale

After a rebranding with a client, we were happy to receive a gift of their logo-emblazed coffee cup. Regrettably, the vendor had placed the phone number and web URL within ‘kissing distance’ of the logo. (This is why we encourage all of our clients to send us a proof before placing an order to help guard the brand identity.)

The logo was uncomfortably close to the contact information and gave the mug a cheap, unprofessional feel.

6 – LOGO DO’S & DON’TS 

Yes, there are incorrect ways to use your logo files. This is a big mistake we commonly see. Here is where the ‘wild, wild, west’ of logo use really needs to be policed by your chief brand officer.  Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

It’s critical to the effectiveness of your brand’s identity that it be properly presented without “creative” liberties applied to it by employees or vendors.

Rotating, stretching, boxing, colorizing, adding effects like gradients and drop-shadows, or “just having fun” with the logo are all temptations that amateur designers can fall into. Where consistency strengthens a credible brand image, inconsistency kills it. Brand Identity Standards Guides are useless if they are not understood and consistently followed.

7 – LOGO FILE NAMING FOR ALL USES

Your raster and vector logo files should be named logically in your Brand Identity Standards Guide. Create folders that will organize your logo files for their specific uses. Raster or bitmap files (like JPGs & TIFFs) have a distinctly different use than vector files (like EPS or PDF files). Vector files are comprised of points, lines, and fills. When scaled up, they never degrade in detail or pixelate, like raster files.

Each of these plays a different role when it comes to reproducing the logo.  Your logo law is followed by using the right logo file, as outlined in a proper Brand Identity Standards Guide.

Maintaining a Professional Brand Identity

When your designer provides logo files, make sure you have someone on your team who understands how to properly implement them. That person also needs to have authority in your company to maintain standards with everything that is produced.

If you did not receive a Brand Identity Standards Guide when your logo was created, invest in one. Seek out a professional who can create the system you need to maintain a professional brand identity.

When a comprehensive, detailed, ‘how-to’ strategy for effective logo use is adhered to, it builds credibility for your brand. The opposite is true. When a logo is changed to fit various contexts, a subtle disaster occurs and it becomes diluted in its impact.

Guard the integrity of your brand’s identity by following your Brand Identity Standards for a remarkable and robust brand.

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