How to Create a Brand Kit? – In-Depth Guide with FAQs, Tips, & More   

Many people will tell you that in order to create an effective brand, you have to be cohesive and consistent. 

What that essentially means is that all of your content, messaging and branding should mesh together properly. That’s how you create a recognizable brand. 

A brand kit is something that you can construct which can help keep your brand identity unified and cohesive. 

What Is a Brand Kit? 

A brand kit can be described as a concise, clear, and digestible template or guide to your brand’s visual identity. When you create posts for social media or compose emails, you will refer to the brand kit for an easy understanding of what to use. 

Some of the aspects that a brand identity kit may contain include: 

• Brand colors 
• Brand fonts 
• Brand message
• Visual assets 
• Branding assets 
• Brand guidelines 
• Branded templates for emails, social media posts, etc. 

And much more. 

They are typically designed to be PDFs so that they can easily be read through electronic devices and also can be printed out if needed. 

You can choose to only share your brand identity kit with your team or you can share it with collaborators as well so they can help promote your brand. 

Some brands even make their brand kits public so that their audience can also chime in and help promote their consistent branding. 

An example of this is Spotify which has its branding kit public. This ensures people who want to integrate Spotify into their apps can do so while keeping Spotify’s branding consistent. 

The Different Types of Brand Kits for Your Brand Identity 

The type of brand kit you decide to have will depend on the type of business you want to run and what your most used marketing channels are. 

The different types of brand identity kits include: 

Digital Booklets 

By far, the most common types of branding kits are digital booklets that are typically in PDF format. 

They can be shared digitally among your employees so that they have all-time access to your company’s brand assets. This will ensure that any marketing content they generate has the same aesthetics as the rest of your company’s content. 

Printed Booklets 

These are becoming less common in today’s digital age but they can also be extremely useful for traditional forms of marketing. 

A printed booklet could essentially be the same as a digital booklet in terms of the content inside of it. For example, it can have information related to fonts, colors, and logos that you should use within your marketing content. 

The only difference is that it would be a physical printed booklet rather than a digital one. 

Shared Libraries and Templates

PDFs can work as a good reference point for people who work on your marketing content. However, it can still be difficult and time-consuming to replicate the brand image just from reference. 

A great solution to this is to have visual templates and shared libraries that people can just use for their marketing content. These templates would have all the visual elements and you can just add information to them depending on what the purpose of it is. 

How to Create a Brand Kit (Step-by-Step Guide) 

Now that you know what a brand kit is, it’s time to make one for yourself. 

Naturally, just like with most aspects related to building a brand, you have to plan everything and do the appropriate research for it first. 

Before you develop a brand identity kit, you need to have a firm grip on what your brand’s visual identity actually is. This means that’s something you’ll have to define thoroughly before you actually build your own brand kit. 

Once you have a strong visual identity defined, you can use it to populate different sections of the brand kit. 

Here’s how you start: 

Step 1: Identify Your Target Audience and Research Them 

We’ve talked at length in many posts about how branding starts with the audience. That’s the first thing you should think about and research when you want to work on branding. 

To check out a detailed method on how to identify your target audience, you can check out our post on how to build a brand.

Once you’ve identified your audience or audience segments, spend some time researching their behaviors, habits, and interests. 

Thus, you can begin to think of ideas on what type of color palette and visual attributes would resonate best with them. 

Step 2: Design Your Logo 

This is one of the first things that a customer comes into contact with when they first interact with your brand. Hence, you need to put in the appropriate time and effort to ensure your logo stands out from the crowd. 

Your logo should be unique and identifiable while also communicating some idea of what your brand is all about. 

For your brand kit, it’s a good idea to have several different versions of your logo that you can use in different places. 

For example, you may have a simple logo for social media profile pictures but have a logo with a wordmark for the social media profile banners. 

Having this as a brand kit feature can be extremely useful to anybody that uses it. It will ensure that you remain a consistent brand while also your marketing content is well-optimized. 

You can also use your brand kit to define the rules for using the logo and what are some things that should never be done with it. 

Some rules you can define include: 

• What the image size should be for different types of pages and websites. 
• What should be done if the logo is on a colored background. 
• What variations should be used in which places?

And much more.

Step 3: Define Your Color Palette 

Some would argue that this should come before you define a logo and the fact of the matter is that they’re interchangeable. 

This is because you don’t define a logo in a vacuum. You have to define it while keeping the color palette in mind. Hence, we would recommend that you define the color palette and the logo for your brand at the same time. 

To figure out the brand colors you will use for marketing material, you will have to once again look toward your audience. 

Your audience needs to be at the forefront of this decision because they are the ones who will interact with your visual content. 

Hence, you have to study them and figure out what type of colors would be most appealing to them. 

This will depend a lot on who your target demographic is and what type of product or service you wish to sell to them. 

Once you have defined the color palette for your brand, you can use the brand kit to define its use. 

Your brand palette may have been defined but there’s a high chance your employees and different people in your team may not know how to use it. 

You’ll need to think about the same types of questions and rules you thought about for your logo. Always remember that these rules can be changed. 

As you run into issues with marketing content, you can use it as an opportunity to redefine your brand guidelines and ensure your team stays on track. 

Your brand kit ensures that people are consistent with your brand assets and use them in a cohesive manner. 

Step 4: Define Your Fonts and Typefaces

The type of typography you use for a brand can play a huge role in how different audience segments perceive you. 

To start off, you have to stick to one basic rule at all times: Use fonts that are clear and easy to read. You don’t want your target market squinting every time they see any of your brand fonts. 

Let’s be real, they won’t even take the time to squint if they see your visual assets on social media. Instead, they’ll just scroll right on by. 

Next, you need to figure out what type of emotion you want to evoke from the audience with your fonts. This will depend on how you want your brand to be perceived. 

Some fonts are fun and quirky while others can be elegant and sophisticated. It’s up to you to figure out what type of mood you want to go for. 

We recommend that you should stick to only a few fonts. Ideally, your brand should have 1 primary font and 1 to 2 secondary fonts. 

Again, your branding kit can lay down the brand guidelines as to how the marketing team is supposed to use these fonts and where. 

Step 5: Add Any Miscellaneous Rules 

If you have any additional rules or tips you want to provide for the ease of your marketing team, you can add them to your brand kit as well. 

An example of such a rule could be if you want the marketing team to shorten URLs every time they share a link to your website on social media. 

To shorten your link through Pixelfy, register an account and log in. 

Step 1: After you log in, you will be at the dashboard page. The URL shortener box is present at the top of the page. 

Step 2:  Copy the link you want to shorten and paste it into the URL shortener box. Click the “Shorten” button.

Step 3: You will receive the shortened link on the next page that you can use anywhere for your marketing content.

Wrapping Things Up… 

That’s how you create your very own brand kit (also known as a brand identity kit). 

A brand kit is not something that’s an essential requirement but we do recommend making your own brand kit if you’re a new business owner. This is especially true if you have multiple people working on your marketing. 

If you have any more questions, let us know in the comments below.

Want to know more about Branding, check out our blog.