You are here: Home
› Branding

Branding

A List of Branding Style Guides: Corporate, Academic and Government Brand Manual/Logo Guideline Examples

Posted by Jason on Fri, 02/19/2010 - 1:46am

We’re about to pitch the creation of a branding style guide to one of our clients. I was putting together an example list of style guides used by well-known companies, planning to include the list in our proposal. But it seemed smarter to expand it into a gigantic list and post it here, so we can reuse it — and you can benefit from it too.

First: What’s a branding style guide? It’s a document meant to ensure an organization’s members are all on the same page as far as official logos, logo usage, colors, fonts, stationery, images, and so on go. It’s good for any organization of any size to think about what messages its print and web materials convey, and then to make sure the whole team stays on message.

Second: Why look at a brand guide made for somebody else’s company? Besides our own reasons for making this list (SEE PARAGRAPH 1), you can learn a ton about branding, design, and identity by studying the materials that guide successful brands.

ONWARD.

A Short List

Just want to see five or so decent style guides, mostly made by organizations you’ve heard of?

The Long List

ABANDON ALL HOPE OF NOT SEEING BRANDING GUIDES, YE WHO KEEP READING. I went for variety and tried to limit the rest of this list just to organizations that most people have heard of. But it’s still the longest curated list of branding style guides on the entire internet… that I know of at least.

Corporate Branding Style Guides (US-based)

Corporate Branding Style Guides (Non-US-based)

Academic Branding Style Guides

Note: To keep the list from getting absurd, I left out all sorts of perfectly good style guides. But for this category alone, I had to exclude many dozens and dozens. Institutions of higher learning: you people really brand your faces off.

Government Branding Style Guides

Group/Nonprofit/Open-source/ASSORTED Branding Style Guides

Sports Branding Style Guides

Content Management System Branding Style Guides

BONUS BRANDING!!! BRANDING BONUS!!!

Three Best Things, 12/14/09 - 12/20/09

Posted by Jason on Mon, 12/21/2009 - 1:16am
  • We saw Avatar in 3D, sitting in the front row. There’s a lot to like, mainly the sensory overload. Two things really bugged me: first, there’s no way a female scientist in the year 2150 uses man to refer to humanity. Second, it’s a movie about a white guy who (SPOILER, I GUESS) 1 enters a new culture group, 2 endures a montage, and 3 quickly becomes better at all the group’s activities than any of the group’s lifelong members. Just as in The Last Samurai, Dances With Wolves, Last of the Mohicans, 8 Mile (peace to Brittany Murphy), Batman Begins, and many many more. This convention goes beyond lazy writing, and in fact presents real sociological puzzles — there’s a strange assumption of supreme white competence, for one. When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like “Avatar”? goes in on the newest version, in which the white guy not only masters the tribe, but becomes its Messiah too. Which is, like, even worse. (NOT REALLY THAT MUCH OF A SPOILER, BUT IT’S OVER)
  • “The boss says, ‘Get there on time;’ the leader gets there ahead of time. The Builder makes sure ‘getting there’ matters.” More: The Builders’ Manifesto.
  • A thorough, detailed case study by the company responsible for NBC’s current comprehensive branding campaign, focusing on the campaign’s dynamic use of bold colors. You should click this, but I’m really not gonna be able to talk you into it. That’s fine.

But Wait There’s More

If Earth had rings like Saturn, what would our sky look like?

Something Completely Drupal

Monty Python is now using Drupal.

ENGINE's Latest Project: 24/Savvy

Posted by Jason on Thu, 12/17/2009 - 8:51pm

Here’s Mario Lopez (yes, A.C. Slater himself) of Extra on 24/Savvy’s launch.

24savvy-website -- EngineIndustries.com

Our latest project, 24savvy.com, is powered by a fully customized Drupal build coated in original web design and branding. It features a social network designed to reward users for contributing, product reviews and contests, a video section, and much more. Take a look here!

24/Savvy (www.24savvy.com) is a multi-media digital community dedicated to providing members with tools for savvier living. With editorial content, style news and reviews, gift giveaways and a webisode series produced by award-winning production company Mountain Lion Entertainment, 24/Savvy is the ultimate destination for living a smarter, more creative life, one savvy step at a time. 24/Savvy, It’s About Your Lifestyle. Not Your Bank Balance.

24savvy-website -- EngineIndustries.com

Three Best Things 9/7/09 - 9/13/09: "I Forgot To Remember To Forget"

Posted by Jason on Sun, 09/13/2009 - 3:21pm
  • Remembering the Beatles: Chuck Klosterman plays really dumb-smart, breaking down the remastered box set released this week by some “Liverpool pop group, a 1960s band so obscure that their music is not even available on iTunes.” With the remasters plus Beatles Rock Band, this week felt like a tiny Beatlemania. It was fantastic. While we’re remembering, here’s an idea: Annual Beatles Day.
  • Remembering 9/11: branding the 9/11 Memorial. More critically, remembering 9/10.
  • Remembering one of the greatest humans of all time. No, not Billy Mays. Norman Borlaug, the agricultural scientist whose contributions have saved literally hundreds of millions of lives so far, died at 95.

    • Three Best Things 8/3/09 - 8/9/09

    Posted by Jason on Sun, 08/09/2009 - 11:09am
    • Who wouldn’t want to run a company just like Netflix’s after reading this leaked internal memo?
    • Considering Slate’s habitual contrarianism, you’d think their readers would come up with more interesting end-of-America scenarios than these. Arab-Israel war will end America? I wasn’t aware America had been relocated. The toy these uncreative types used to come up with the seeds of the apocalypse is pretty fun to fiddle with for at least three minutes, but here’s the real prize: a social network that shows which scenarios were linked to each other. Apparently, Robot Overlords connects to Alien Invasion. Does that mean the robots are in charge of the aliens, too? The future is rich with intrigue. Still, this week’s finest mother lode of semi-useless data: How Different Groups Spend Their Day. Speaking of spending time, if you can’t waste a solid twenty minutes with this chart, then you are just not cut out for charts of any kind.
    • Surely you happened to see this Coke vs. Pepsi logo nonsense about 26 times this week. It intends to show, for some reason, that Pepsi’s logo changes every eight minutes while Coke is a solid rock. Here’s the real story: Coca-Cola vs. Pepsi, Revised Edition. Survey says Coke changes its logo every bit as often as Pepsi does. And Coke even changed, uh, Coke itself at one point, lest we forget. Who knew Coke had fanboys?

    AddToAny

    Share/Save