Whether you’re sharing your brand with a collaborator or communicating your company’s message internally to new team members, creating a brand kit is a simple and straightforward way to package up all the details of your brand’s identity. Consistency is key when it comes to communicating and maintaining a brand identity—and having a brand kit is an essential piece of the puzzle.
You can think of a brand kit as a set of assets or toolbox that contains all the aspects of your brand’s visual identity—logos, templates, color palette, font, and other graphics. The purpose of a brand kit is to consolidate all of your brand’s design assets so that they can be easily accessed and reproduced both internally and externally. Visual consistency helps strengthen your company’s image with its audience and makes your brand feel familiar over time. A brand kits keeps all of your brand identity’s visual assets and guidelines in one place, so that there’s never a question over which version of a logo or which font to use.
What should be included in a brand kit?
Your brand kit should contain any visual or graphic asset that a designer might need to reproduce your brand’s visual identity—both digitally and in print.
Logo
Your company logo functions as the face of your brand across all visual communications. A strong logo embodies a company’s values in a graphic way and serves as an icon that’s recognizable even when the company name is not present.
Your brand kit should contain multiple versions of your logo, if available. This might include your primary company logo, your secondary logo, logos with just brand initials, or logos that are used as icons. It’s a good idea to include multiple file types and sizes of your logos in your brand kit, so that the designer using them has flexibility. You should include both color and black and white versions of your logos as well. Here are some additional helpful tips for designing a logo for your brand or business.
Fonts
If you’re putting together a brand kit, it’s most likely because your company has something to communicate. And when you have something to communicate, you do it in writing! That’s where the importance of typography comes in—like the other aspects of your brand’s visual identity, the fonts you use should also be consistent across all brand communication.
In your brand kit, be sure to include the font selections for your brand. Place the digital folder that contains your selected font family into your brand kit so that it’s easily downloadable for the team member that needs it. Does your brand use multiple fonts for different types of text? Make sure to include all of them in your brand kit.
Color palette
Although it may seem subtle, the colors that you use in your company communications are actually a key part of your brand’s visual identity. When you’ve developed a consistent color palette over time, your audience will notice when something is off—moss is not the same color as olive! For this reason, it’s important to include your color palette in your brand kit. The most straightforward and foolproof way to communicate your color palette is by reproducing the hex codes that you use across visual communications. Using the eyedropper tool to select a color in design programs like Adobe will give you the exact combination of symbols that a designer needs.
Templates
Creating templates for various types of communication—social media posts, internal memos, client presentations, banner ads, etc.—is an effective way to save time and guarantee that your visual communication is consistent. Include these branded templates in your brand kit so that your designer has an established starting point. Creating template sets to include in your brand kit can also be helpful—if you have a few ways to template an Instagram post, create an Instagram template set. These subsets can live under a larger social media template set. The more organized you can be with your templates and sets of templates, the easier it will be to reproduce your company’s visual identity.
Other graphics
If there are specific images or other visual accents, like shapes, that your brand consistently uses, you should include these in your brand kit as well. Like your logo, include variations on file size and type for different scenarios.
Why do you need a brand kit?
A brand kit is the simplest way to ensure that your company’s visual communication stays consistent. With a brand kit, designers both internally and externally know where to access your brand’s graphic assets. Packaging these assets in one file makes sharing your brand identity a streamlined process that ultimately saves everyone on your design team from a headache!