The Expanded Brand Guidelines Approach

Time to dive into the secret sauce of developing expanded brand guidelines.

This section assumes you already have a logo, perhaps one or two fonts, and a few core colours laid out in your existing brand guidelines document. If not.. you can follow this process to create your brand guidelines by scratch.

It’s possible your guidelines are a bit outdated and you’re ready for a refresh. Major changes usually require input from company stakeholders — if you’re making significant updates, you’ll also need to manage stakeholder expectations and consider how your audience will perceive the change.

Our approach focuses on evolution, not revolution. Gradual changes help maintain brand recognition while bringing your visuals up to date and more versatile.

What Expanded Guidelines Include

Some of the elements you might add or update in an expanded brand guidelines document include:

  • Colour Palette: Introduce additional colours, or slightly tweak existing ones — but stay close to your “home base” to maintain brand recognition.
  • Typography: Add a decorative or accent font, refine existing fonts, and establish rules for headers, body copy, and hierarchy.
  • Social Media Moodboard: Include imagery, imagery treatment (filters, overlays), video style, simple animation, and graphic devices.
  • Templates: Custom design templates for social posts, email newsletters, presentations, or other collateral.
  • Website Review: Guidance for homepage layout, image treatment, and layout consistency to reflect the brand online.

All of these elements show how your expanded brand guidelines translate into the public domain — not just on paper, but in real-life applications.

Documentation & Asset Management

It’s helpful to create:

  • An expanded brand guidelines document that includes rationale for each section.
  • An online asset folder with logos, fonts, and templates. This makes it easy to share assets with third-party partners, such as printers or agencies, without confusion.

We’ll also cover how to write the rationale for each element, helping others understand your design decisions and making the guidelines more actionable.

To get inspired, you can check out these brand documents we created for some of our clients in 2025:

[insert docs]

Next Steps

We’ll break down the components of the brand document individually so you can see how to expand each section effectively.