Assemble a brand guidelines PDF covering logo, colour, type, and voice

A client hands your logo to a printer at Oshodi. The printer stretches it to fit a banner, prints the green as a muddy olive, and sets the tagline in Comic Sans. Nothing was stolen and nobody was careless — you just never wrote down the rules. The brand guidelines PDF is that written record, and for most small-business clients it is the single most valuable file you deliver.

Words in this lesson

What the document is actually for

A brand guidelines PDF is an instruction manual for anyone who will touch the brand after you: the printer in Oshodi, the signage guy, the nephew who runs the Instagram page, the next designer the client hires in 2027. It is not a portfolio piece and not a mood board. Every page should answer a question someone will actually ask.

For a small business — a food brand, a barbing salon chain, a logistics startup — 12 to 18 pages is right. (In Figma, each page of the guide is a frame, and all of them sit together on the client file's Exports page — the free plan's three-page limit never comes into it. Export the frames together as one PDF.) A 60-page corporate manual is showing off, and nobody reads it.

We will build the document around one running example: Kàyà Logistics, a Lagos last-mile delivery startup. Substitute your own project as you go.

The page order that works

Use this as your table of contents. It moves from identity to the most reusable assets, which is the order a reader naturally needs them in.

01  Cover
02  Contents
03  Brand in one page (who they are, who they serve)
04  The logo — primary lockup
05  Logo variations (horizontal, stacked, icon only)
06  Clear space and minimum size
07  Logo misuse — what not to do
08  Colour palette — primary
09  Colour palette — secondary and neutrals
10  Colour usage and accessibility
11  Typography — the typefaces
12  Type hierarchy in use
13  Brand voice — tone and personality
14  Voice in practice — do / don't
15  Putting it together — sample applications
16  Contact and file index

Set the document at A4 landscape (297 × 210 mm). It reads well on a laptop, projects cleanly if the client shows it in a meeting, and still prints if someone insists on printing it.

Page 3: the brand in one page

Before the visuals, one short page that says what the brand is. Three or four sentences, not an essay.

Kàyà Logistics moves small parcels across Lagos for online sellers who cannot afford to lose a customer to a late delivery. We are fast, plain-speaking and reliable. We are not a luxury service and we do not pretend to be.

This page matters because every later decision — why the type is bold, why there is no gold in the palette — traces back to it. You will lean on this heavily in the next lesson when you defend your choices out loud.

The logo pages

Primary lockup. One big, clean placement on a white background. Nothing else on the page.

Variations. Show each version and say in one line when to use it. Be specific:

That last row is not a joke. Small Nigerian businesses get rubber stamps made constantly, and a stamp cannot reproduce a gradient.

Clear space. Define it using a part of the logo itself so it scales. "Leave clear space equal to the height of the letter K on all sides." Show it with a dotted box.

Minimum size. Give a number for print and for screen: "Never reproduce the horizontal lockup below 25 mm wide in print, or 120 px wide on screen. Below that, use the icon."

Misuse. Six thumbnails, each with a red cross and a caption. Make them the mistakes you actually expect:

• Do not stretch or squash
• Do not rotate
• Do not change the colours
• Do not add a drop shadow or outer glow
• Do not place on a busy photo without the white version
• Do not re-type the wordmark in a different font

This page saves you more grief than any other page in the document.

The colour pages

Give every colour in every format someone will need. A hex code alone is useless to a printer.

Kàyà Navy      HEX #10243F   RGB 16 36 63     CMYK 95 80 45 45   Pantone 296 C
Kàyà Orange    HEX #F26522   RGB 242 101 34   CMYK 0 74 92 0     Pantone 165 C
Warm Grey      HEX #F4F1EC   RGB 244 241 236  CMYK 3 3 6 0       —
Ink Black      HEX #111111   RGB 17 17 17     CMYK 0 0 0 95      —

A few practical notes to include:

• Proportions. Show a bar: navy 60%, warm grey 25%, orange 10%, black 5%. Without this, someone will make an entire flyer orange.
• Pantone matters here. Nigerian printers vary wildly. A Pantone reference gives the client something to point at when the branded polo shirts come back the wrong shade of orange.
• Contrast. State which combinations are legal for text. "White text on Kàyà Navy: approved. Orange text on Warm Grey: not approved for body copy — contrast is too low." Check pairs at webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker before you publish.

The typography pages

Name the typefaces, say where to get them, and — this is the part beginners forget — give a fallback.

Headings   Poppins SemiBold        Google Fonts, free
Body       Inter Regular / Medium  Google Fonts, free
Fallback   Arial Bold / Arial      When Poppins and Inter are unavailable
           (Microsoft Word, WhatsApp graphics, third-party invoicing tools)

Always choose at least one free, widely available typeface for a small-business client. If you specify a ₦90,000 licensed font family, the client's admin staff will not have it, and the brand will quietly drift to Calibri within a month.

Then show the hierarchy at real sizes, as a specimen:

H1   Poppins SemiBold   36pt / 40pt leading   Kàyà Navy
H2   Poppins SemiBold   24pt / 30pt           Kàyà Navy
Body Inter Regular      11pt / 17pt           Ink Black
Caption Inter Medium     8pt / 12pt           Warm Grey 70%

Follow it with one mock page — a flyer or a social post — using the hierarchy exactly, so the reader sees the rules working rather than just listed.

The voice pages

Most beginner guidelines stop at colour and type. Adding voice is what makes the document feel like a brand identity rather than a logo receipt — and it is the part the client's social media person will actually use every day.

Start with three tone words and a sentence disowning the opposite of each:

Direct — we say the delivery time, not "soonest possible". Warm — we are people, not a portal. Unfussy — no corporate padding, no "kindly be informed".

Then a do/don't table with real sentences from the client's world:

Add a short words we use / words we avoid list, and a line on Pidgin. Be explicit, because the client's team needs the ruling: "Pidgin is welcome in Instagram captions and WhatsApp replies. Keep English on invoices, contracts and the website." A brand that never decides this ends up sounding like two different companies.

Building and exporting it

Build it wherever you already work. Figma, Canva, Illustrator, even Google Slides set to A4 landscape — the reader cannot tell and does not care. What matters is the export.

• Export as PDF, screen quality, and check the file lands under about 10 MB. Anything bigger is slow and costly to open on mobile data, and WhatsApp is how your client will forward it to their printer.
• Embed the fonts, or outline the type, so the PDF looks right on a machine that does not have Poppins.
• Put a version number and date on the cover: v1.0 — March 2025. You will thank yourself when v2 exists.

The PDF ships inside the delivery folder, not alone:

06_handover/
├── 01_logo/
│   ├── svg/                   (kaya_logo-horizontal_v01.svg, kaya_icon_v01.svg, ...)
│   ├── pdf/                   (vector, for the printer)
│   ├── png-transparent/       (@1x @2x @3x)
│   └── jpg-white-background/  (for anyone confused by transparency)
├── 02_colour/
│   └── kaya_colour-codes_v01.pdf
├── 03_fonts/
│   └── download-links.txt
├── 08_brand-guidelines/
│   └── kaya_brand-guidelines_v01.pdf
├── README.txt
└── SOURCES.txt

Name files the Module 1 way — lowercase, hyphens inside a group, underscores between groups, a version number, no "final-final-2". Folders 04 to 07 of the full handover (imagery, graphic elements, voice, templates) sit alongside these. Include SVG and PNG and a print-ready PDF — you will not be there to explain the difference at 11pm when a banner is being printed.

Common mistakes

The short version

• A logo gets stretched, recoloured and set in Comic Sans because nobody wrote the rules down.
• The document exists to be used by a printer, an intern and the owner — not by designers.
• For a small business, 12 to 18 pages is right. Longer goes unread.
• Every rule needs an example, and a misuse page showing what not to do.
• Always include clear space and minimum size — the two most-broken rules.
• Export as PDF, because it will be forwarded on WhatsApp.

Try it yourself

Take the strongest of your three brand projects and build the full 16 pages tonight. Then run this test: send the PDF to a friend who was not involved, give them the logo files, and ask them to design one A5 flyer for the business without asking you a single question.

Every question they are forced to ask you is a missing page. Write those pages, export v1.1, and your guidelines document is finished.

In the next lesson you will walk a client through this document out loud — and discover that the pages you can defend in conversation are the pages you understood well enough to write.

You'll know you've got it when a printer who has never met you could use the brand correctly from the document alone.