Your Logo Is Exempt From Contrast Rules. Your Brand Colours Are Not.

Our published ranges are INR 35,000 to 65,000 for Core Guidelines, INR 85,000 to 1,50,000 for a Full System, and INR 1,75,000 to 3,00,000 for a system with a machine-readable token file. Most businesses that contact us fit the first two. What moves the number is not how many pages you get, which is the wrong thing to buy on, but how many applications need specifying and how tangled your current material is. A company with one logo file and a hex code is a quicker project than one with nine logo variants in circulation and nobody certain which is current. If you see a quote built on page count, ask what is being specified instead, because a sixty page document covering only the logo is worth less than twenty pages covering the work your team actually produces.

In practice nothing, and anybody drawing a firm line between them is usually selling one of them. The terms brand guidelines, brand style guide, brand book and brand manual all refer to the same thing: the written rules for applying a brand correctly. You will also see brand book design services and brand style guide design advertised for it, and brand identity guidelines used as the label, and our own brand guidelines design work covers the same ground under whichever name you prefer. What does differ meaningfully is scope. Some documents cover only the logo, with clear space and minimum sizes in detail and nothing else. Others cover the whole system: colour with measured contrast, a type scale down to captions, applications, tone of voice, and the ordinary material a team produces weekly. When you compare suppliers, ignore the name on the cover and ask which of those two you are being quoted for, because the price difference between them is substantial and the names do not signal it.

Core Guidelines take two to three weeks, a Full System five to seven, and a system with tokens eight to eleven. The variable that actually drives the timeline is not our drawing speed, it is how quickly we can get a complete picture of what you are using now. The audit in week one needs every logo file, every colour anybody has adopted, the fonts actually installed on your machines and a sample of recent material. Clients who can supply that in a few days finish at the fast end of the range. Clients who have to go hunting through old agency emails and a shared drive nobody has tidied add two or three weeks before design work properly starts, and that is normal rather than a failing.

Often not yet, and we will tell you when that is the case. The honest test is how many people make things with your brand on them. If it is one person using one set of templates, the rules live in their head and that works fine. The moment a second person starts producing material, or you hand work to a freelancer or an agency, the drift begins and a document starts paying for itself immediately in avoided rework and briefing time. So the trigger is not company size or revenue, it is the number of hands. A two-person business that uses three freelancers needs guidelines more than a twenty-person business where one designer makes everything.

At minimum: an audit of what is in use, colour values in hex, RGB, CMYK and Pantone where relevant, every text pairing contrast checked, a type scale including the small sizes, and logo rules covering clear space, minimum size and permitted variants with wrong-use examples. A full system adds the ordinary applications, which is the part most documents skip and most teams need: tables, forms, charts, buttons, documents, email signatures, social templates. Tone of voice belongs there too. What should not be in it is forty pages of brand story that nobody consults to get a job done. Put that somewhere else if you want it, and keep the specification to things somebody can act on.

Because a palette chosen for a logo gets used for text by people who were never told the difference, and the W3C is explicit about the two not being the same. Its guidelines require a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal-size text and 3:1 for large text, while stating that “Text that is part of a logo or brand name has no contrast requirement.” So a soft grey can be perfectly legitimate in a logo and a bad choice for paragraph copy. If the guidelines do not mark that distinction, somebody will eventually set your website body text in the display tone and the result is hard to read, which costs you more than any branding decision in the document. We measure every pairing and label the failures as display only.

Yes, and that is the majority of what we do. The project starts with an audit rather than a redesign: we collect everything in circulation, identify what is strongest and most consistent, and build the specification around that. Where we find genuine conflicts, two logos both in active use, or a palette with no colour safe for text, we flag them and recommend the smallest change that resolves it rather than proposing a rebrand. If the conclusion is that the identity itself is not settled enough to document, we will say that plainly, because guidelines written over an unresolved identity just record the confusion. That conversation happens before any quote.

A token is the machine-readable form of a brand value. The W3C design tokens format, published as a Final Community Group Report in October 2025, defines one as “information associated with a human readable name, at minimum a name/value pair”, stored in JSON, with seven core types including colour, dimension, font family and font weight. The practical value is that a developer imports the file instead of reading a hex code off a PDF and typing it in, so your website, your design files and your templates stay in agreement. You need them if you employ somebody who writes code. If you do not, a token file is a file nobody will ever open, and we would rather you spent that money on the applications in the Full System tier.

Include the Pantone reference if you print, because it is still how a printer matches a colour reliably, but it can no longer be the only value on the page. Adobe’s help documentation states that as of the October 2023 release all the Pantone Color books were removed from Illustrator following a licensing change, and that using them in new work requires a Pantone licence through a plugin, while six other libraries remain available without one. So a designer opening your guidelines may not be able to load the swatch you have specified. We give every colour as hex, RGB and CMYK alongside the Pantone reference. It takes one extra line per colour and removes an entire category of problem.

Fewer people than you expect, and designing for that is the point. Realistically the heavy users are whoever produces the most material, usually one or two people in marketing, plus any outside designer or agency. Everybody else consults it two or three times a year to find a logo file or a colour. That is why we keep the core document short and put reference detail in an appendix, and why the walkthrough session matters more than extra pages. If you want a single answer to this question before commissioning anything, ask the person who makes the most material what they would need to stop asking you questions. Their answer is a better brief than most formal ones we receive.

The document as a PDF, the editable source file so you can correct and extend it, the colour values in a format you can copy as text rather than screenshot, logo files in vector and raster for both print and screen, and on the top tier the token file in JSON. The source file matters more than people expect at the time: guidelines without one cannot be corrected, only replaced, so the first small change makes the whole document stale. We hand over working files on every tier for that reason, and it is worth asking any supplier whether they do the same before you commission.

There is no useful calendar for this, because guidelines go out of date by event rather than by time. The triggers are a new sub-brand, a new channel you are suddenly producing a lot for, a product line that does not fit the existing system, or a visual change made for a campaign that quietly became permanent. Any of those should prompt an update. Absent them, a sound specification holds for years. What we recommend instead of an annual review is a standing habit: when somebody has to invent a rule to finish a job, that is the signal, and it should get written in rather than repeated from memory. We include a short note at handover on which parts we expect to need revisiting first.

In the Full System and above, yes, and kept practical. That means the words you use for your own products and services, the ones you avoid, how formal you are in different contexts, how you handle the specifics your industry gets wrong, and worked examples showing the same message written well and badly. What we do not include is a page of adjectives, because confident, approachable and professional describe almost every company and guide nobody. If you want voice work at more depth than a section, that is its own project and we will quote it separately rather than thinning it into the document.

Yes, and it is a separate line so you can see what each part costs. The guidelines specify how a thing should look; building the actual deck, document, email and social templates your team opens is marketing collateral design. Plenty of clients take the specification from us and have their own designer build the templates, which is a sensible way to spend less. What we would discourage is buying templates without the specification, because then the rules only exist inside the files and the first person who needs something the templates do not cover has nothing to work from.

Yes. We provide brand guidelines services in Delhi and across Delhi NCR, and we work with businesses elsewhere in India and overseas, billing in INR, USD or AED. Being a brand guidelines company India clients can meet in person helps mainly during the audit, where going through material together is faster than exchanging files. Everything after that works remotely without loss. If you want to create brand guidelines for my business is the search that brought you here, the useful first step is the same wherever you are: send us your current document if you have one, your logo files, and three or four recent pieces of material. The audit tells both of us what the project actually is.