What actually belongs in a brand kit

Most brand kits are assembled the way the project happened rather than the way they will be used. That is why a client can own a beautiful set of files and still email you asking for a white version of the logo.

Here is the list, in roughly the order a client reaches for things.

The logo suite

Not "the logo". A suite.

Each lock-up is its own thing - the primary, a secondary or stacked version, a badge or icon for a profile picture - and each one needs its colour treatments and its file formats sitting with it:

• Full colour, for almost everything
• Mono, dark, for single-colour print and faxes that somehow still exist
• Mono, light, for placing on a dark background or a photograph
• SVG for anyone building a website
• PNG with a transparent background, for everyday use
• EPS or PDF for printers, who will ask for vector and mean it

The single most common gap is the light/reversed treatment. It is also the one a client needs at the worst possible moment, usually while putting the logo on a photo an hour before something goes to print.

Colours

Hex codes, at minimum, because that is what anyone building anything will paste in.

Add the print values if the brand will ever be printed - CMYK, and a Pantone if one was specified. A client who takes hex codes to a printer will get something that looks close but not right, and will assume the printer got it wrong.

A swatch file that loads straight into Illustrator or Affinity is a small kindness that saves every future designer twenty minutes.

Type

The typefaces, and where each one is used. "Headings" and "body" is enough detail for most brands, but say it explicitly rather than leaving it to be inferred from the guidelines PDF.

The part most kits skip is licensing. If the display face is licensed to you rather than to the client, say so in the kit. Finding that out later, mid-project, with a third-party agency already using it, is a genuinely bad afternoon.

For anything from Google Fonts, a link is more useful than a file, because it will not go out of date.

The guidelines

The document, if there is one. Worth having somewhere readable rather than only downloadable - a PDF that has to be downloaded before it can be read tends not to be read.

Keep it short enough that somebody might. A twelve-page document that gets opened beats a sixty-page one that does not.

Everything else they will download

Photography, illustration, icon sets, document templates, social templates, email signatures. This is the part that grows after handover, and the part most likely to end up in a second zip file.

Sort it into categories a client would use, not categories that describe the production process. "Social" and "Print" are useful. "Exports v3" is not.

The two things that are almost never included

Who to ask. A name and an address for the person who maintains this. Kits outlive the relationship they came from, and in two years somebody will need to know whether they are allowed to stretch the logo.

What not to do. A short list of the specific misuses you can already predict for this particular mark. Not the generic don't-stretch-it page, but the real one - the mark is not legible below 24px, the badge is the only version for a circular crop, the secondary lock-up is never used on dark.

That list is the actual expertise in a brand kit. It is worth writing down.