What Is a Brand Kit? How to Build a Brand Kit

A brand kit is a compilation of visual materials and assets for maintaining a consistent brand visual identity. Brand kits are essential and efficient tools that dictate style rules for color palettes, typography, logo designs, and other brand elements so that marketing materials are cohesive and recognizable to a target audience. These brand design kits are helpful for new hires and freelance designers who need to familiarize themselves quickly with a brand’s visual identity and rules.

A company’s brand kit provides its graphic designers with a short guide and the information needed to execute brand consistency. Brand identity kits unite the visual elements of a brand, making these kits essential for small businesses and large corporations. The brand elements within a kit will dictate the design and execution of social media posts, emails, business cards, website pages, and other traditional and digital marketing assets. Consistent branding can boost brand recognition, leading to more robust consumer engagement.

Brand kits will define the use of several design elements, including:

• Color scheme: It’s important for brand colors to remain consistent. A brand kit’s color scheme includes the hex codes designers use for a brand’s primary and secondary color schemes.
• Logo treatment: The company name may have various treatments in different formats. Some formats might include the full name of a business; others might shorten it to a single letter. Kits show how you can communicate a brand message through simple, memorable logo designs.
• Photography: The kinds of photographs brands use—staged portraits versus candid shots, black-and-white photos versus color ones—will also be a part of these branding guides.
• Templates: For visual consistency, your company’s brand guide may also come with templates for email blasts, social posts, and print materials to provide designers with a structure.
• Typeface: Brand fonts are often custom fonts that designers build to reflect the style and tone of a company. Drives for downloading the typography design will often be in a brand kit, along with how to treat the text’s spacing (known as kerning and leading).

A brand kit is a concise version of a more comprehensive brand style guide, which outlines brand assets and design choices in detail. Learn how to make your company’s rulebook through the steps below:

1. 1. Begin your guide with a brand story. Before diving into the brand guidelines and rules, open your brand style guide with your company’s mission statement with an accompanying image or logo that connotes the values of your business. This information will give the reader a firm foundation to understand your business and give designers a strong sense of what all the subsequent imagery should convey.
2. 2. Discuss your brand voice. Written communication is generally part of an editorial style guide, but sharing dos and don'ts of how text behaves concerning images, photos, and ads will be helpful for readers. Designers should understand the tone of your brand voice, which will come through both visually and verbally.
3. 3. Highlight different logo iterations. Logos will have to fit into ads tall and wide, square and round. Show your logo's adaptability so designers can see its many iterations better. Branding mogul Kris Jenner knows that designing a logo to fit a brand's ethos is challenging. For her part, she creates a vision board to brainstorm creative ideas. “Before social media and before everything was splashed everywhere, you knew that your logo was gonna go in print, on a billboard, maybe on television, if you were really lucky,” Kris says. “And now, it's a much different ballgame. So the images and the creative [elements] and the exposure to all of that is so much greater—the stakes are higher.”
4. 4. Include your typography. The brand identity includes the company’s font and spacing of letters and words. Articulate the design choice behind your font and how to employ written content in graphical contexts.
5. 5. Share your brand’s color palette. Companies typically have a primary logo color and secondary (and sometimes tertiary) colors that operate as accents. Show swatches of colors that define the look and feel of your brand. “When you start developing your brand, one of the first things you think about is your logo and the colors you're gonna use, what it's gonna feel like, and what is gonna be your palette,” Kris says. “If you want to choose pink, what color pink? There are a lot of decisions to be made, and I really feel like they're very important decisions.”

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