What a brand kit needs to contain to be usable by someone else

A brand kit needs six things: logo files in vector and raster form with rules for spacing and minimum size, colour values in every space you will actually print or display in, typefaces with their licence position stated, one or two worked layouts showing the parts combined, a short list of what not to do, and a file-naming scheme that survives being dropped into someone else's folder. If a designer you have never spoken to can open the kit and produce a correct social post without asking you a question, it is finished. If they email asking which blue, it is not.

That test is the whole point. A brand kit is a handover package. Everything in it exists to answer a question a stranger would otherwise have to ask.

Logo files

Ship the vector original and the exports, not one or the other.

SVG for anything on a screen — it scales without blurring and stays small. PNG for placement into slides, documents and tools that refuse SVG, exported at a couple of generous sizes with a transparent background. PDF or EPS if anything will be printed by someone who is not you. Skip JPG entirely for logos: it cannot hold transparency and it puts compression artefacts around hard edges, which is exactly where a logo lives. (The format pages on this site explain what each of these needs to open: SVG, PDF.)

Include the variants people will otherwise improvise: the full lockup, a horizontal version, a stacked version, a mark on its own, and single-colour versions in black and in white. The white one matters more than it sounds — someone will put your logo on a dark photograph this month.

Two rules travel with the files. Clear space, expressed relative to the logo itself ("keep a margin equal to the height of the letter S on all sides") so it holds at any size. And a minimum size in both pixels and millimetres, chosen by looking at the mark small rather than by picking a round number.

Colour

Hex is not enough, and this is where most kits fall down.

Give hex for web, RGB for screens where a tool asks for the three numbers, and CMYK for print. A hex value converted to CMYK by whoever happens to be sending the file to a printer will come back a different colour, and it will come back after it has been printed. If anything will be produced in volume — packaging, signage, merchandise — a Pantone reference is worth agreeing while you still have a designer engaged, because matching it later is guesswork.

Name the roles as well as the values. "Primary", "surface", "text", "accent", "error" tell someone what to reach for. A palette of six unlabelled swatches tells them nothing, and they will pick the prettiest.

Include a usable-contrast note for the combinations that appear in real work: text on the brand colour, the brand colour on white, white on the brand colour. The WCAG minimum for body text is a contrast ratio of 4.5:1, which several handsome brand palettes fail. Better to discover that in the kit than in an accessibility audit.

Type

State the typefaces, the weights actually used, and — this is the part that breaks handovers — the licence position.

You usually may not hand your fonts over as files. An open-licence family from Google Fonts (most are under the SIL Open Font Licence) can be redistributed and self-hosted, so those you can include, with the licence file alongside them. Adobe Fonts, by contrast, come with a Creative Cloud subscription and cannot be passed on as files at all: the recipient needs their own subscription and their own activation. A commercial foundry licence is normally seat-limited and sometimes web-traffic-limited, so the person receiving your kit needs to buy their own, and they need to know that before they design something they cannot publish.

So write the position down explicitly: family name, foundry, where it was bought, what the licence covers, and what the recipient must do. Then include a fallback stack for the situations where the real font is unavailable — email, a client's locked-down laptop, a Google Doc someone shares externally. Choosing that fallback yourself is better than letting Arial choose it for you.

Layout rules and worked examples

Rules in the abstract get ignored. One or two finished pieces — a social post, a slide, a one-page document — showing correct spacing, correct type scale and correct colour roles do more than five pages of principles. Provide them as editable files, not screenshots, so the next person starts from the geometry rather than eyeballing it.

Add the type scale as actual numbers (heading, subheading, body, caption, in points or pixels with line heights) and a spacing unit. "Generous whitespace" is not a rule. "8px base unit, section padding 48px" is.

The short "don't" list

Five to eight items, each one thing you have seen go wrong or expect to: don't recolour the mark, don't stretch it, don't put it on a busy photograph without the white version, don't add effects, don't retype the wordmark in the brand font, don't use the accent colour for body text. Illustrate the wrong version next to the right one. People remember the picture and forget the sentence.

Anything beyond about eight becomes a rulebook nobody reads, which is the same as having no rules.

We sell a Brand Basics Kit built to this shape: a Figma file with the logo variants, colour styles, type scale and two example layouts as components, plus a PDF version of the rules for people who don't use Figma. It's a structure to put your own brand into — no logo design, and no typefaces are included, for the licensing reasons above.

Naming and folder structure

The kit will be unzipped into a shared drive and the folder name will be lost. Assume that, and name defensively:

brandname-logo-full-colour.svg
brandname-logo-full-white.svg
brandname-logo-mark-black.png

Lowercase, hyphens, no spaces, no version numbers in the filename unless the version is meaningful to the reader. Put a plain-text or PDF read-me at the top level with the colour values, the font position and a date. When someone finds one loose file in two years, the read-me is what makes the rest recoverable.

When you don't need one yet

A brand kit is a coordination tool. If nobody except you produces anything — no contractor, no printer, no agency, no team — you can hold the whole thing in your head and the kit is procrastination dressed as diligence. Two hex values and a font name in a note will carry you a long way.

It is also premature while the identity is still moving. A kit documents decisions; if the mark is likely to change this quarter, you will document it twice. The exception is a genuine handover, which forces the decisions whether you are ready or not.

And a sixty-page brand book is almost always the wrong artefact for a small business. The strategy chapter, the tone-of-voice essay and the photographic mood pages are not what the person making a slide deck on Thursday needs. If you want both, keep them as separate documents so the practical one can be short.

Related

• What belongs in a freelance proposal
• Structuring an SOP people actually follow
• Kits, themes and layout sets in the shop: Brand & Design Kits