What Is a Brand Kit? A Simple Guide to Building Your Brand Identity

When it comes to making an impact on the market, visual identity is important. This is where brand kits come in.

These are used by everyone who touches the brand, from marketing and the design team to third party partners. They take brand elements from all corners, providing a truly comprehensive resource, so if you don't have one, it's time to start!

Let's explore what a brand identity kit is, the brand elements it defines, and how you can effectively get started with your own!

What Is a Brand Kit and How to Understand It?

A brand kit refers to a resource that establishes and defines the rules of a company's branding. It details not just the brand's visual identity, but also the company's brand voice, writing style and how the various brand assets can be applied throughout any and all possible channels.

Such a resource is an essential "brand bible" for anyone who influences the company's brand.

Components of an Effective Brand Kit

While brand kits can come in many varieties, there are a number of core, essential elements to consider.

Logo

A logo is one of the important visual elements of any company or product. Next to the name, it aids your target audience in recognizing your goods or services.

Subsequently, a brand kit defines the primary logo, any secondary variations and overall logo usage, including:

• How the logo is formed and how it ties into the brand story
• How the logo should be placed, including how much space is around it
• Accepted logo variations, such as horizontal, vertical, long or short form.

An alternative color version and a monochromatic version of the logo are typically included. Primary and secondary logos are needed because the logo itself could appear on clashing backgrounds.

Color Palette

Every recognizable brand has a strong color palette, including primary and secondary colors, but also tertiary colors. The color palette defines these to their exact shade - including assigned CMYK, RGB and other color codes - and what percentage they are to be used.

A typical rule, for example, is the 60/30/10:

• Primary colors should be used in 60% of the space, as it's the most associated with the brand.
• Secondary colors can take up to 30%, as they are chosen to compliment or contrast, but never overshadow, the primary color.
• 10% is reserved, at most, for tertiary colors, used as accents when needed.

These colors are designed to envoke feelings from your intended audience, whilst other times they are intended to stand out from the crowd. Think about Coca-Cola's red, and compared to Pepsi's contrasting blue.

Typography

As part of your collective imagery, brand fonts matter just as much as colors. They can define how your company is perceived. Fonts can be formal, informal, playful, classic... there's a whole world to explore.

Brand Kit Examples

If you're looking for an effective brand kit example, we recommend reviewing the following brand kits available online.

Netflix

When it comes to a well known brand, Netflix is one of the best real life examples. Their branding site clearly defines their logo and wordmark, with clear guidance on which logo variations can and can't be used.

Hulu

In contrast, you can take a look at Hulu for a great example of an alternative, brand identity. From vibrant colors to a focus on clear presentation, their brand assets ensure a lasting impression.

Google

Whilst Google's visual elements may seem rather minimalistic, the company's brand kit goes into great detail on ensuring it's global brand recognition. Take a look at their brand guidelines to see how they define sub-brands, ensure consistency and choose their color palette.

These brands take great effort to breakdown their visual assets and identities, which is why they're the best brand kit examples for this guide.

The Importance of Brand Kits and Brand Identity

A consistent brand image is important. When your audience sees your brand imagery, they should get a sense of your brand's personality and remember it. Overtime, this leads to greater recognition.

Now imagine how many people are involved in a company's branding? From your marketing team to regional teams, graphic designers, third party collaborators and more, there are many different people involved. It's not one singular creative team, so the need for predefined branding kits is essential. If everyone who works on the brand sticks to the defined design elements and style guide, then the brand's identity will be ensured.

How to Create Your Own Brand Kit

Now you know what a branding kit is, let's take a look at the various design elements to go into ensuring consistent branding.

Define Your Brand Story

Every brand has a narrative: who you are, what you do, and why you do it. Your brand's story should be defined here, to ensure its consistency throughout further marketing efforts.

Knowing this at the start will influence the next step. For example, knowing your brand mission can influence the emotions you want to evoke, and thus the colors and imagery that you want to ibuild your brand's identity around.

Write a Brand Style Guide

A style guide is a document that defines how your company communicates. Are they formal, or informal? Friendly, or distant? Are there any particular go-to words, or terminology to avoid? Implementing a brand style guide will go hand in hand with the visual elements, such as the typography and font choices.

Develop Visual Elements

Now you know the feelings you're going for, it's time to bring them to life. Every branding kit should include enough colors, assets and elements to enable striking ads, but not so diverse that you could create two different ads that have no visual connection.

Common elements to include are:

• Logo: If you have a logo already, define it's usage for brand consistency here. You should also design the secondary logos and other variations here, too.
• Color choices: Think about your primary, secondary and tertiary colors. Which colors best represent the feelings from your brand story?
• Contrasting colors: Whether for clicking buttons on a website, or for drawing attention, strong contrast is essential in any branding.
• Color variants: Your full-color logo looks great on a black and white background, but what about different colors? When in doubt, monochromatic versions can ensure all possibilities are covered.
• Imagery: What kind of style represents your brand? Do you focus on abstract graphics, real life photographs or vibrant illustrations?
• Typography: Not every brand needs their own custom fonts, but you should have a core set of fonts to use.

Compile and Distribute

Once your brand guidelines and assets are finished, it's time to share your brand kit! Ideally, you should share your brand kit with marketers, advertisers and designers. Anyone who creates anything visible should use the brand kit and follow the guidelines.

When in doubt, share! Brand kits are not a secret document, but a powerful resource to be used. There's a reason big companies like Netflix and Google publically share their brand guidelines.

How to Use a Brand Kit in Product Ads?

Of course, if you're advertising in multiple formats and across different channels, the manual approach is going to become increasingly inefficient. This is where Cropink can help!

Our ads design tool is built to help you make a plethora of ads as quickly as possible. This is done thanks to our custom dynamic ad templates, which can take the brand elements you give us, such as text, logos, images and brand colors, and then recreate the adverts on all the formats you need.

Summary and Key Takeaways

A company brand kit is a powerful resource for ensuring your brand's visual identity. It tells your marketing teams, designers and more what the brand strives to achieve and how to do it. With it, no marketing or advertising material goes off brand.

What's more, by doing the hard work and preparing an effective brand kit upfront, you can save time further down the line. Not only will it help new designers get caught up straight away, they can also use it with dynamic ad tools to rapidly create powerful imagery that truly conveys the brand values and message.What Is a Brand Kit and How to Create It?

When it comes to making an impact on the market, visual identity is important. This is where brand kits come in.

These are used by everyone who touches the brand, from marketing and the design team to third party partners. They take brand elements from all corners, providing a truly comprehensive resource, so if you don't have one, it's time to start!

Let's explore what a brand identity kit is, the brand elements it defines, and how you can effectively get started with your own!