Blog · 3 April 2025

Brand guidelines examples

Public brand guidelines worth studying, from Mailchimp to GOV.UK and Atlassian, what a good brand book includes, and how to keep the PDFs searchable.

TLDR

• A good brand book covers logo, colour, type, imagery, and voice, with examples of right and wrong, and explains the why.
• Public ones worth reading: Mailchimp’s content style guide, the GOV.UK style guide, and Atlassian’s design system.
• Keep brand PDFs somewhere that can search inside them, or you’ll never find “the page about logo spacing” again.

What a good one includes

1. Logo. Versions, clear space, minimum size, and what not to do (stretched, recoloured, on a busy photo).
2. Colour. Primary and secondary colours with hex, RGB, and CMYK, and how much of each to use.
3. Typography. Typefaces, weights, sizes, and what to use where.
4. Imagery. Photo style, illustration rules, icons.
5. Voice and tone. How the brand sounds, with before-and-after examples.
6. The why. The ones people follow explain the reasoning. The ones people ignore just list rules.

Public ones worth studying

Mailchimp’s content style guide. The voice and tone section is the most copied in the industry for good reason: clear principles, lots of examples, and it reads like a person.

GOV.UK style guide. Writing for millions of people who don’t want to be there. Brutal clarity. Every content designer should read it once.

Atlassian design. A full design system: brand, components, and content guidelines in one place.

Brand portals. Plenty of big companies publish brand sites for partners and press. Search “[company] brand guidelines” for any brand you admire, and look for a press or brand page in their footer.

PDF or website

A website stays current and you can link to the exact section. A PDF is what you send an agency on day one. Most teams end up with both and they drift apart, which is how you get three slightly different blues.

Keep them searchable

Brand books are long, and you always need one specific page: logo clear space, the secondary palette, the rule about photos of people. Savepad reads every page of a PDF, so search “clear space” and it opens on that page. Save the brand fonts and the palette alongside, and the whole brand sits in one folder. Voice is its own topic, covered in tone of voice examples, and if you’re briefing someone with all of this, the creative brief template helps.

Join the waitlist