Why do I need a brand guide?
- Hannah Stater
- Oct 22, 2025
- 4 min read
From local lesson barns to national show management companies, everyone needs a unique, eye-catching identity for their brand. Designating a color scheme and fonts for your business, along with creating a beautiful, custom logo, helps new and current clients identify your business and demonstrate their loyalty to your mission.
So, what is a brand guide?
A brand guide is a useful tool for identifying your color palette, fonts, imagery style, and logo that provides guidelines for the use of your business logo and name in marketing materials. This is especially handy when ordering business merch, creating signage, or sponsoring an event. A brand guide may also include your social media account handles and contact information, making it easy to share all your business' brand information with partners in one, easy document.
Determining your brand identity can be a difficult task! Horse & Hound Marketing understands how personal your brand is to you, so we offer logo and brand guide services to help ease the process. Learn more about our services here.
How do I create my own brand guide?
Personally, I believe creating a color palette and choosing fonts for your brand is one of the most fun aspects of building out your promotional print and digital materials!
The first step to creating a brand guide for your business is to determine your color palette. A color palette consists of around three to six colors that represent your brand and are often separated into primary and secondary sets. These colors represent your mission, personality, and style, and will be plastered onto everything around you, so choose colors that you love!
Pro Tip: Black and white are considered neutral colors, and are not typically included in a color palette, unless you're going for a formal or edgy style!
It is important to choose a palette that works well together, so I like to use tools like ColorKit's Color Palette Generator to build a collection. It's free to use!
If you have a specific color in mind, you can click on a rectangle and enter either the HEX code (six-number code) or use the color mixer to find it. If not, click "Generate Palette" to start your search! Once you find a color you like, press the "Lock Color" button in the rectangle to lock it in. The generator will then find colors that work well with your locked colors.
Pro Tip: Choose a mix of dark and light colors, not all light or all dark, for the best graphic design outcomes. You want to be able to layer your colors and/or use them together.
Popular colors in the equestrian community are navy, light blue, hunter green, burgundy, and gold, often paired with white or black.
Once you've chosen your colors, write down the HEX codes found at the bottom of the rectangles. For example, Horse & Hound's HEX codes are #00072D, #C6E0FF, #132A13, and #D0E562. Those numbers equate to the colors seen above.
Optional: Determine your primary and secondary colors. For instance, the evergreen and lime green colors above are H&H's primary colors. The midnight and light blue are the secondary colors. When designing the primary logo and other marketing assets, the greens are the primary colors utilized.
The second step to creating a brand guide for your business is to determine your fonts. The widely understood rule of determining fonts is to choose one Serif font and one Sans Serif font. Serif fonts are more traditional and easier to read in print, while Sans Serif fonts are easier to read on digital platforms, which is why social media platforms use them for their captions.
Examples of Serif fonts include Times New Roman and Garamond. This is a Serif font.
Examples of Sans Serif fonts include Arial and Helvetica. This is a Sans Serif font.
Alternatively, you could choose a cursive font for your logo and use a Serif or San Serif font as the secondary font. Be careful not to choose a primary font that is difficult to read or overuse a cursive or other "busy" font. Use it sparingly to make a statement.
For example, H&H's fonts are Kelin Eator (Serif) and Arimo (Sans Serif). The Serif font is only used in logos and titles/headers because it is a bit busier, while the Sans Serif font is used much more frequently in text because it is easier to read.
Now that you have your color palette and fonts, you can place them into a brand guide document. I like to use Canva for all my design needs. I'm not sponsored but always open to chat.
Start with an 8.5" x 11" blank portrait file or use one of their templates. Create squares colored with your brand colors, and don't forget to include the HEX codes! Add your fonts in underneath, and you're on your way to creating a full brand guide. Additional information to add may include:
Primary and secondary logos and logo marks (which will feature your colors and fonts)
Example photos to display your style
Use guidelines:
When to use the colors and fonts
Allowed backgrounds for the logos
File formats, sizes, and clear space
Improper usage
Brand verbiage
Social media handles
Business contact information
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