Your Brand Guidelines Are Missing. Here’s Why That Matters.
Even great logos fall apart without systems. Here’s why your business needs brand guidelines — and how to build them (even after the fact).
You’ve got a logo you love. It’s on your business cards, your building, maybe even the side of your delivery van. It’s been with you since the beginning — or at least since the last rebrand.
But here’s the thing: a logo, even a great one, is not a brand.
Without guidelines, your logo is out there fending for itself — floating in a sea of mismatched colours, questionable font choices, and DIY design decisions made at 4:47pm on a Friday.
And if every person on your team — or worse, every external vendor — is taking a slightly different approach?
You don’t have a brand.
You have vibes.
The Missing System
Brand guidelines are the connective tissue that holds your visual identity together. They're not fluff or bureaucracy — they’re the user manual for how your brand shows up in the world.
At minimum, brand guidelines should cover:
Logo usage (primary, secondary, don't-ever-do-this)
Typography and type hierarchy
Colour palettes with HEX/CMYK/RGB values
Visual do’s and don’ts
Photography and iconography styles
Tone of voice, if you’re really doing it right
A strong brand standards guide will keep an organization, internal teams and outside partners or vendors on the same page when designing and publishing new brand assets.
This isn’t about rigidity. It’s about creating a flexible system so that whether you're printing a business card or launching a TikTok campaign, it still feels unmistakably you.
Why Guidelines Save You Money (and Your Sanity)
The #1 reason businesses resist investing in a proper brand system?
They think it’s overkill.
But inconsistency costs more in the long run:
Wasted time trying to recreate the “right blue”
Endless back-and-forth with freelancers
Ads that don’t match your landing page
Social posts that “don’t feel like us”
A thousand micro-decisions that wear your team down
Brand guidelines scale your decision-making. They create confidence. They let your internal team — or external support like Orbit — create faster, better, and more strategically.
No Guidelines? No Problem (We Reverse Engineer Them All the Time)
Here’s the good news: even if you never got formal brand guidelines from your original designer, it’s not too late.
At Orbit Studios, we routinely reverse-engineer brand systems for clients who started with just a logo. We analyze what’s working, clean up inconsistencies, build templates, and create a brand guide that fits how your business actually functions today.
No unnecessary complexity. No 100-page PDF nobody reads.
Just a usable, scalable system that helps your brand look better, work harder, and show up with purpose.
Your brand deserves more than guesswork. Let’s give it the system it needs to thrive.
Orbit offers brand system audits and fast-turn brand guideline builds for growing businesses. Whether you’ve got a logo and need the rest, or want to clean up a Franken-brand that’s grown messy over time, we can help.
Learn more about Orbit’s BrandSprint and DesignInfinity services here.