Product guide template

Think about things like differences in menu trees, icons, feature names, etc. But, obviously, all of those are very different applications. The more of these blogs I write, the more I become aware of consistent themes. Creating the content your audience wants and not necessarily what you want to tell them is one of the most consistent. As noted in this article about how to create more effective customer education content , there are a number of ways to figure out exactly what that is, including online forums, customer surveys, or even from your own technical support staff.

Regardless of how you get it, delivering content your customers want and need will go a long way in ensuring the success of your quick-reference materials. Avoid huge blocks of text as much as possible Instead, use visual elements such as screenshots with markup, icons, or product photos — and just enough text to ensure your points are clear. Keep it to one or two pages. Choose the most important information to accomplish a particular task or that otherwise conveys what you want to show.

Boil down complex concepts into their most basic form. Know what to leave in and what to leave out. Remember, you can always create another quick-reference guide to cover other important topics. Sometimes a simple screenshot annotated with arrows, text, etc. Images draw the eye and help provide anchor points to your content, helping your users quickly and easily identify important points of information.

In fact, our Value of Visuals research found that people learn better with images and text vs. You can learn all about how valuable visual communication can be with this awesome infographic. And, have you ever heard the terms a picture is worth a thousand words? Well, it turns out the best way to show something is to actually SHOW it. A good image can convey a ton of information and help reduce the text density of your content and make it more user-friendly. Our friends at Venngage have some more information on the importance of visual content.

Not all quick-reference guides will be as simple as the one I created. Some will need more text, others will need more images. Some will need more complex layouts. Depending on the subject, it may be longer. There is a wide range of types of and uses for quick-reference guides, and it would be impossible to cover them all here. Quick-reference guides are a great way to provide your users and customers with fast and handy instructions for the most common features of your product or service.

From screenshots and image editing to templates and image assets, Snagit makes it incredibly easy to create useful, engaging, and visually appealing quick-reference guides.

Well, when your logo appears on anything from a presentation deck to custom t-shirts across hundreds of companies, it can easily be misused. With a section like this in their brand guidelines it will hopefully help those many creators use it correctly.

You can use this exact approach in your brand guidelines to make sure your brand marks are used correctly by both your internal team too. Set the tone of your brand from the beginning with a great title page like in this template. These designers choose to use a bold photo that feels very serious and professional.

Additionally, throughout this brand guideline template , they include examples of images that fit their mission. This can help give designers and writers a clear idea of what to strive for.

A solid example of bold brand guidelines comes from Homestar. From their brand colors to the motto and even the headers of each page. For them, bigger is better. You can tell a reader a lot about your brand just from the font you use in your branding guidelines. This year, serif fonts are extremely popular because they can be used to both feel professional and trustworthy.

For a brand that works in a very hectic industry, like healthcare, building that initial trust is very important. There is nothing worse than seeing your beautiful logo smashed up against another graphic on the page. Incorrect spacing can really ruin any visual in an instant. To avoid this fate, you should definitely include a section which shows how to correctly space your graphics.

In this brand guidelines example from Idea. Showing that nothing should come within 4px of the logo, or else. Standing out in the market is one of the main reasons that you are creating a visual brand in the first place. But if the branding you choose is too close to your competitors, all this work will be a waste.

Before you decide on any fonts , colors or graphics I would take a look at what your competitors are doing first. As you can see, Mobingi took this advice pretty seriously when developing their logo. You can include this section in your brand guide if you want, especially because it explains how you picked a certain logo. Your brand guidelines should obviously include a nice collection of authorized company visuals or images.

Instead, try organizing the official images by topics or use like Airbnb does. If you work for a company like Lonely Planet , which publishes a ton of travel guides and content, creating your own custom icons is a must. Be sure to outline all of these custom icons in your brand guidelines like they did above. Consistent icon usage is probably very important to them because it helps readers or travelers recognize and utilize their content instantly.

Created by Steven Arnold , the directions in this unique brand book example are so simple and straightforward that anyone could follow them. They make sure to include examples of it being used in the real world, and fun visuals to drive home the point. You probably have heard about using white space in your designs or graphics in the past. If not, it basically is the open space around icons, text or other design elements.

White space is one of the most important things that a lot of new designers forget about. But it can make a huge difference in how easily someone can consume information in your graphic. In this brand style guide template, they use white space extremely well.

Nothing feels bunched up and even though there is a ton of information, you can easily move through it. Tech brands are in a unique situation when it comes to creating brand guidelines. Not only do they have to make sure the branding works on a ton of digital platforms, but also in the real world.

Now this means that your style guide might be a little more in depth than some of the other companies that we have looked at. Most color palettes are presented in a similar fashion.

They are either shown within circles, squares, or other simple shapes. But this innovative brand style guide decided to shake up those conventions with their bold color palette. First, they dedicate an entire page to their brand color schemes , which shows how much those colors actually matter to them. His name is Freddie, if you were wondering. Because of that value to the company, they have to make sure that likeness is used correctly. So in their branding guide, they have a section dedicated to using a monkey correctly.

These days, many brand names are made up , missing letters or are a mashup of multiple words. If your company has an obscure or made up name, like Mailchimp , be sure to show the public how it should actually be used. This includes showing what letters should be capitalized and if the name includes any spaces. As you can see in this example, Netflix has organized all of its brand guides onto a landing page.

In my search for great examples for this article, I found that a handful of larger brands used this idea as well. Also, by giving your brand guide its own site, you show to the public that you really care about what it says. Colors are going to interact in different ways if they are used on a mobile device. Each color in their palette has been approved for use on a device, or not, with a smart icon.

Get extra specific with your guidelines as a consistent brand is worth its weight in gold these days. Especially when your company has spent so much time building a strong visual brand. In this example from WebSummit they show which colors should be used with each font. This may seem like a bit much, but I think it helps show exactly how your branding should be used.

If you took a quick look at the official brand colors from Mozilla you would probably be able to figure out which were the main and secondary colors instantly. Visitors can quickly learn about their primary and secondary colors thanks to this simple trick. A huge trend that we saw taking over was the explosion of muted brand colors. Dropbox was one of the first large companies to embrace this trend fully. As you can see above, instead of using their old trademark blue, they expanded their brand color palette significantly to include some muted colors.

These rather massive changes were undertaken to position the company as something that connects the creatives of the world. I think they did a great job with the rebrand.

Dribbble uses this tactic in their brand guide, with Hiring, Teams and other teams in their company getting their own official color. This can come in handy when creating internal documents such as marketing plans or reports , blog posts, presentations and more.

There are words out there that no matter how many times you read it, you still will never know how to pronounce it correctly. So the people over at Disqus decided to create a short video that shows the perfect way to pronounce their name.

Creating a brand voice or tone guide like this example from Envato will help your employees or designers avoid calling the same thing a handful of random other names. Not having a consistent brand voice will just leave the reader confused and could even lead to the loss of a customer. This is extremely useful for a large and rather diversified company like Envato. Why not show exactly how a font would look in all your brand colors with a single click?

I hope more companies will follow their lead and make the guides more interactive for everyone. This section is a little different than the others, but it still has a lot of great brand guidelines examples. I wanted to highlight them because they have done a great job of creating and maintaining a visual identity. These examples can help you keep a very consistent brand identity on social media as well. Like I mentioned with the corporate brand guidelines, there is a lot of risk for inconsistent branding when your company expands.

But these social networks have been able to keep very consistent branding throughout the entire growth process. If you really want to show off your product or app in the best light, include some high-quality product screenshots. Not only will this make your product look amazing, it will help your brand control the visual narrative around it. Then they could create a screenshot of really anything, instead of using the perfect one your brand should have already made. Obviously for internal brand guidelines you should include more than just a few screenshots as well.

When you are working for a company as large as LinkedIn , you are probably going to have a handful of brand colors to choose from.

With thousands of projects and smaller companies under their control, it makes a lot of sense to have an extended colors palette to choose from. This tip may not apply to every company, but many bands may have a few sub-brands under their umbrella. Even at Venngage we have Beam and a few other projects that have their own branding. This means that every smaller brand is going to need its own set of brand guidelines. Make sure they are easy to find, like the Facebook brand guidelines did above.

A simple way to guarantee that your branding is used correctly by affiliates is to show how not to use that content. Summarize some of your brand values and ideals in a useful introduction instead. The intro section outlines all the simple rules and guidelines for using their brand. Within a minute or so you can understand how the entire platform works! Company culture is incredibly important to both your team.

People want to know that their company stands for the right things and will feel safe working there. How do you convey your company culture to prospective employees and fans of your brand? So they take the time to explain how that word should be used in the official YouTube brand guidelines.

Depending on the size of your nonprofit, you could probably just create simple brand guidelines. But if you work for a multinational nonprofit organization, the guidelines need to be a little bit more in depth. Especially because a consistent brand is very important if you are hoping to raise money or gain the trust of new volunteers. In this space, brand consistency can make or break your organization. Additionally, the volunteers working for your brand might not be as aware of your branding or how important it is to your mission.

Also, be sure to read our complete guide to nonprofit marketing for more tips and templates. This brand guide template uses a ton of visual content to tell a compelling story about both the company and its goals.

Instead of showing employees where they can find your brand guidelines online, you could give them this book on their first day. Not only will it outline exactly how visual branding should be used, it can provide some insight to the history or culture of the company. Set a book like this one from the Museum of Humanity on every desk, or in every meeting room so anyone can take a look if needed as well.

Different countries may have different design trends and preferences. Our logo maker can help! But first, check out our post on what logo styles consumers trust the most. Infographics are one of the best ways to present information in a visually engaging way.

They masterfully created an infographic of their brand guidelines that outlines the many facets of their branding. Overall they took something that usually has a very rigid template, and turned it upside down to make the information more engaging.

Learn how to repurpose your content into infographics and other visuals with our handy guide, or browse our nonprofit infographics. Presenting data in an effective, consistent and beautiful way is a bit tricky sometimes. In this incredible brand guidelines from Truth, they spend two full pages telling their employees how they should visualize data.

When you have a ton of teams working on different projects, this brand guidelines should help them present a united front. Almost like they each came from a single overworked designer. New to visualizing data? Our data visualization best practices guide is a great place to start. If you want to learn more about creating brand guides from scratch read our guide to creating a brand style guide from scratch.

Want to learn how to build your own Brand Style Guide? Before thinking about your catalog design, you must decide on the content it and an appropriate template to match it. The more observable the design, the better. After you are done with the content, text, graphics, and images, we can then start to tackle the design.

These are some tips that are worth remembering. You might have some of your own, but it pays if you can incorporate these tips as well. Each of these templates comes with a high-quality resolution for clear layout at any size.

Our business catalog templates are ideal for those who have a business or for those who are just starting up. These also come in highly modifiable formats, which means you can alter them as necessary or according to your needs.

You may change the format, add an image, or add more details to it, so on and so forth. The colors used are catchy, yet they are not too complicated to look at. You can download these templates straight to your computer or laptop and print them after.