Create a brand book for complex projects

A brand book is not necessary to create good designs. Especially, when you’re a beginning designer, creating logos or flyers for a couple of bucks, brand books are simply to much of a time-eater to use in the creative process. But when you work on a bigger project that lets you brand (or re-brand) a bigger company, creating a design book is a great tool to find and select ideas.

What is brand book?

A brand book can be used to visualize the character and personality of a product, a company, a band, or an organization. It collects all the visual ideas that come to mind, when thinking about the project.

It contains drawings, illustrations, photos, type, colours, composition, and everything else that makes you think about the project you’re working on.

Brand books can be used for client presentations, it can tease the final work before it has been created, and it can also support the final work by showing the real-world usage of it as part of your brand book.

It can be used to give the client guidelines to use your designs, it can be used to sell the design as well. But sometimes, a brand book is just a way to collect your own ideas about a project. It is your reference, your brainstorming collection, and your guideline to creating the final design.

Some brand books will never be seen by clients, while others are the reason clients specifically choose a design.

How to create a brand book?

A brand book is a training wheel, a helping guide, or a selling tool. The way it should look is dependent on the reason you create it. If you create it for clients, you should use a specific format, if you create it for yourself, there should only be rules that help you create ideas.

If you’ve never created a brand book, start like this:

• Pick a format: DIN A4 is good for collecting ideas and presenting them to clients. Smaller formats are good for carrying it with you to collect ideas everywhere you go. A digital brand book offers a lot of “digital freedom” while being more problematic to use away from a computer. (I use OneNote for personal brand books, while DIN A4 is good to show to clients)
• Collect images: Collect them yourself with a smartphone, collect them with Google image search, use images your client gave you.
• Collect brainstormed designs: Illustrator ideas can be easily imported to OneNote. Create multiple artboards, connect your ideas and only filter for the best after your brainstorming session is over.
• Work in phases: Phase one is collecting, phase two is creating, phase three is criticizing, phase four is filtering, phase five is finalizing.
• Print it out and create a real book from it: Holding real paper in your hands changes everything. As good as software like Illustrator is and as comfortable as using a CPU has become, designs simply look different on a screen compared to how they look on paper.

A brand book is a helpful tool. It is worth our time creating it.