The 5 principles of a successful brand bible

Have you ever wondered why certain brands deliver products year after year that look visually consistent? Products that, if you covered the logo up, you could tell who made them at a glance? This is the holy grail for many brands: translating the company’s voice faithfully into products.

As a design consultant, I’ve worked on branding projects for large companies over the past couple of decades. Along the way, I’ve come to understand the importance of having a clear brand book or “bible,” and I’ve developed a set of principles for ensuring its success. I will share them today to help you create a practical brand bible for your next project.

The best designers I’ve worked with always have a decent grasp of what’s happening elsewhere in the company, and the best marketing people I know often hang out with designers to find out what’s in development. But it’s usually challenging to bring together the marketing and design departments, especially in larger companies. They might be on different sites or even in different countries. Often, they’re run by people with different goals, and this can lead to conflict and ultimately confused-looking products.

Sometimes, companies lose their way a bit when they expand or simply grow older. They contact people like me to ask them to refocus their brand internally so they can communicate a stronger, more coherent message externally.

That’s when I make a brand bible. It’s an internal document, often digital but sometimes printed, that gets shared throughout the company. Really, marketing and design benefit the most, but the idea is to make something that everyone wants to read. I like doing a brand bible because it’s a collaborative process. I get to articulate a company’s hopes and dreams, and they contribute to the book, too, so they have a sense of ownership when it gets published.

You may also have heard the term “brand guidelines”, which is sometimes used interchangeably with brand book or brand bible. The difference for me is in the scope—a brand bible is a comprehensive document that captures a company’s story, vision, and values, whereas brand guidelines are more technical, focusing on specific rules for using visual elements like logos, colors, and fonts to ensure consistency.

These are the five principles I’ve developed for creating successful branding books.

Company history is like catnip to marketing folk. It gives them something interesting to talk about and communicates a sense of success and experience to their consumers. It’s like saying, “We’ve got this; we’ve been doing it for ages!” If you’re a brand with a century’s worth of experience, that says a lot, right?

For designers, a company archive can be a goldmine. (Note to new companies—keep a living archive of your produce. It’s a nightmare tracking down the original product 50 years later and trying to repurchase it all on eBay!) Ignore history at your peril. Don’t believe me? Hollister fictionalized their company history to give themselves the authenticity they were missing.

I worked with a footwear company once that made many leather boots. However, when we dug into the company’s history, we found that their original product was made from rubber, which made us wonder how we could incorporate that material into new products so we could tell their origin story in a visually appealing way. Be mindful of what kinds of silhouettes and logos were originally used. Fashion is cyclical, and old logos and designs look cool if they’re resurrected sensitively.

But you can’t wallow in the past—the brand has to be linked to the company’s future aspirations. What are those aspirations, and do they align with the company’s original concept? It’s always beneficial for brands to keep reminding themselves why they exist in the first place. But what about newer brands with no history to speak of? The same applies. Why was the company formed? What gap in the market did it need to fill? How can those original aspirations inform the design of future products?

This is where a company vision or mission statement comes in handy. Spend time on this—it matters. A single sentence should inspire and, at the very least, guide your design and marketing teams for years to come. Brands that change their mission statement every five minutes don’t really know who they are; in turn, their customers won’t know who they are either. Customers like confident brands that know how to behave.

Once you’ve developed your brand mission, you can discuss how to translate that idea into a product. Are you a brand that likes using traditional handmade techniques, or are you all about the cutting edge of modernity? These attitudes will directly inform the design lines that make up your product, and in return, this should feed into your marketing plan, even down to what font you use.

The “red thread”, “brand DNA”, call it what you want—it all means the same thing. It’s the fairy dust that gives a brand its personality. I find it’s easier to think about it in terms of handwriting. We must keep our handwriting tidy and consistent so people can read it and know it’s ours. Consumers want to return to a brand knowing it will deliver ‘same-same but different’ every time they visit.

Think about picking up a thriller and enjoying it so much that you go out and buy another one from the same author, only to find that when you open the book, it’s a teen romance set in space. You might be very disappointed. You might feel cheated, even. We all have favorite places we go for certain things, from running shoes to laptops to underwear. We go back repeatedly to these brands because we’re confident they will deliver the same thing done differently or better. But how do the successful ones do it? What makes a brand consistent?

This is where developing a set of design values comes in. For example, if your brand is all about producing minimalist, timeless products, it’s unlikely you’ll want a designer to finish every detail with a flourish. From closures to stitch lines to the type of packaging it’s delivered in, all these things should point towards those minimalist, timeless design values.

You should be able to line up every item in your collection, and they should look like they belong to the same family. It’s OK to have differences in how brothers and sisters look different, but that family resemblance should be apparent in every piece you make. We can do this using lines, color, logos, and materials. The tricky part is defining those lines, that color palette, that logo, those materials.

This should be self-explanatory, but for those of you who are still classifying customers by age, please don’t. It’s much more sensible to group customers by their attitude rather than their age, income, or job.

There’s often a big difference between customers that a brand has attracted in the past and customers that a brand wants to attract in the future. People like me are often called in when a brand wants to radically change its customer base, and a decision has to be made as to whether to alienate older customers in favor of attracting new ones or whether to make a slower transition from one to another. Be nice to your consumers. Know them and respect them. They’re the ones who pay your wages.

You can have the most astonishing, groundbreaking information for your company to digest and implement, but nobody will look at it if it’s hard to read and not dressed up nicely. This is especially true of designers, who take aesthetics very seriously and often don’t want to read a dry, text-heavy brand manual.

The brand bibles I work on are rich with aspirational imagery and look more like magazines than manuals. It’s much easier to illustrate points with… yes, an illustration. Ironically, I can’t illustrate this article with brand bibles I have worked on because of confidentiality issues. But you get my gist, hopefully.

With these five principles, you can develop a brand bible that looks great and truly reflects the company’s values. Your exact process may vary, but a good branding design should always result from a deep understanding of the company’s history, vision, and customers.

When you’re putting together the brand bible itself, use templates from Envato to help you nail the design and make it readable and visually stunning. Read more about what branding is and how to redesign a logo.