SaaS brand guidelines template.
Eleven sections, what belongs in each one, and the test we use on handover to decide whether a section is finished. The raw Markdown is on this page — copy it, delete what you cannot fill in honestly, and ship it under your own name. There is no form, and there is no attribution requirement.
This is the document, not the deliverables: what your brand kit should contain is a separate and canonical list in the SaaS brand kit post. If you have not settled positioning and voice yet, the five-pillar strategy framework comes first — guidelines written before strategy just document a mood. And the wider context for all of it is the brand identity for SaaS guide.
What this document is for
A brand guideline earns its keep in exactly one situation: someone who is not you has to make a decision, and you are not in the room. A contractor building a landing page at 9 pm. An engineer picking a grey. A salesperson rebuilding a slide the night before a board meeting. Every rule that does not help one of those people is decoration.
That is why the template below is short, and why most of it is tables. The sections people actually open are the mechanical ones — colour roles, the type scale, minimum logo sizes, which template to use for an OG card. The sections that get admired and never opened are the ones with the mood board.
The other thing it does is end an argument cheaply. A written rule is something a junior designer can point at. Without one, every decision is relitigated by whoever is most senior in the thread that day, and the brand drifts in the direction of whoever talks the most.
The eleven sections
01 How to use this document
A brand guideline is a decision cache: things decided once so nobody re-decides them in a Slack thread on a Friday. Say who owns it, where the source files live, and what someone should do when the answer is not in here — because that case is the common one, not the edge case.
Done when: A new designer or contractor can find the source files and the owner without asking anyone.
Usually fails as: The document opens with the founder’s origin story and never names an owner, so nobody maintains it.
02 What we are
One sentence on what you do, for whom, and what changes for them. Then who it is for, what you are not — the adjacent things people mistake you for — and the proof anyone may use in public. That last list matters: if a number is not on it, it does not belong on a slide.
Done when: Two people from different teams describe the company the same way without opening the file.
Usually fails as: Positioning lives in a strategy deck nobody outside marketing has opened, so sales writes its own.
03 Voice
Three traits, each with what it means here and what it is not, then five real sentences copied from shipped work rather than written for the document. Add the small rules that actually settle arguments: capitalisation of the product name, sentence case or title case, how you write dates, currency and ranges, and the words nobody may use.
Done when: Someone can write a release note in your voice on their first week, and the error-message rule is in there too.
Usually fails as: Three adjectives — “bold, human, innovative” — and no examples, which is a vocabulary, not a voice.
04 Logo
The mark and the one-line reason it looks like that; the lockups and when each is used; clear space; minimum sizes; which version goes on light, dark, photography and the brand colour. Include the never-do list, because that is the page people screenshot and send to a vendor.
Done when: The symbol is legible at 16 px — check it as a favicon before signing anything off.
Usually fails as: A mark specified at 200 px on a white slide that turns to mud in a browser tab and in an app icon.
05 Colour
Name colours by role — surface, ink, muted ink, accent, semantic states — not by hue, so that changing a value does not break the meaning. Publish the contrast floor next to the palette: 4.5:1 for body text, 3:1 for large text and for UI borders. A brand colour that fails at body size gets a darker sibling token; it does not get an exception.
Done when: Dark mode is defined token by token, not described as “invert the page”.
Usually fails as: Six swatches with hex codes and no roles, so the product invents a seventh grey every sprint.
06 Typography
Families, weights, and the fallback chain that renders while the webfont loads. Then the scale as numbers — size and line-height per token — rather than “large, medium, small”. Write down the licence: how many seats you own and whether the web licence covers the product, not just the marketing site.
Done when: An engineer can build a page from the scale without asking what size a section heading is.
Usually fails as: The licence question surfaces two days before launch, when the foundry answers in three working days.
07 Space, radius, elevation, motion
The unglamorous section that decides whether a product looks designed or assembled. A spacing scale with nothing off it, two or three radius values each tied to a component, elevation levels that mean something, and motion durations with their easing — plus the line that says everything respects reduced-motion.
Done when: Two teams building two features produce screens that look like the same product.
Usually fails as: Skipped entirely, because it feels like engineering’s problem — and then every modal has its own corner radius.
08 Imagery and illustration
What qualifies, what is off-limits, and the rules for product screenshots: which theme, and fake data that looks real rather than a customer’s live account. Add the alt-text rule here, so accessibility is part of the brand and not a ticket someone files later.
Done when: Someone briefing an illustrator can do it from this section alone.
Usually fails as: A mood board is pasted in place of rules, so every new asset restarts the argument.
09 Applications
One row per surface — marketing site, product UI, sales deck, social and OG cards, marketing and transactional email, app stores — with its owner, where the template lives, and the one rule that breaks most often on it. Transactional email deserves its own row: it lives in a different system from marketing email and is missed on almost every brand rollout.
Done when: Every surface has a name next to it. Surfaces without owners are the ones that stay on the old brand.
Usually fails as: Applications are shown as pretty mockups rather than as templates anyone can open and use.
10 Tokens and handoff
The guidelines are the explanation; the tokens are the contract. Say where they live, how they are named, how a value change is proposed and announced, and state plainly that nothing in the product hard-codes a hex, a radius or a duration. If a value is not a token yet, that is a bug in the document. The long version of this section — three tiers, role-based naming, contrast siblings, the handoff checklist — is a separate post.
Done when: A palette change reaches the product in one pull request instead of a redesign.
Usually fails as: The brand ships as a PDF. Engineering re-types the values, and the second brand — the one in the code — is born the same week.
11 Governance
Who approves a brand-level change, who grants an exception and in writing where, how someone adds to the document, and how often it is reviewed. Exceptions are fine. Silent divergence is what kills a system, and it happens when there is no visible way to ask.
Done when: The document has been edited by someone other than its author.
Usually fails as: Version 1.0 is also the final version, and by month six the real brand lives in whatever the last contractor shipped.
Take the template
The whole thing is one Markdown file — brackets to replace, tables already built, roughly two pages once it is filled in. Paste it into Notion, Google Docs, your repo, or whatever your team will actually open.
What to leave out
Every item below is something we have watched add pages to a document without changing a single decision downstream. Cutting them is what keeps the file at a length people re-open.
- The origin story. It belongs on the about page. In a guideline it pushes the rules below the fold on the one page people open in a hurry.
- Mood boards. They record a feeling somebody had once. Rules survive a change of designer; a collage does not.
- Rationale for every decision. One line on why the mark looks like that is useful. Six pages of justification is a pitch deck that wandered into the wrong file.
- Rules for things you do not have. No mascot, no sonic logo, no photography team — then no sections for them. Add the section the week you add the thing.
- Print specifications you will never use. Pantone bridges and CMYK builds matter when something is printed. For most SaaS that is a conference banner once a year, and the printer will ask.
- An email gate on your own team. If people inside the company need a form to get the logo, they will keep using the copy in their downloads folder — the one from two brands ago.
Who writes it, and when
The right moment is the one where the answer stops being obvious to everyone: usually the first contractor, the first engineer who is not a founder, or the first time two pages of your own site disagree. Before that, a paragraph in the README is enough. After it, every week without a written rule costs a small correction somewhere.
An in-house team can write this in two sittings, and it will be better than an agency’s version in one respect: the examples will be real. What outside help buys is the mechanical half — the token naming, the contrast floors, the fallback chain, the application templates — and the willingness to delete the sections you do not need. A guideline is one of the deliverables of a brand identity engagement, handed over as Figma variables plus this Markdown rather than as a PDF, because a PDF is where brand decisions go to be re-typed by hand.
Frequently asked
What is the difference between brand guidelines and a design system?
Guidelines are prose plus rules: why the mark looks like that, how the voice sounds, which lockup goes where. A design system is code and components: the button that already has the right radius, the token that already holds the right hex. Most SaaS teams need the guidelines first and grow the system out of them — and the join between the two is section ten of this template, where the values become tokens instead of staying screenshots.
How long should SaaS brand guidelines be?
Short enough that people re-open it. Filled in, this template runs about two pages plus tables, and that is the right size for a team under fifty people. Length comes from sections you do not need — mascot rules with no mascot, print specifications for something you print once a year. Delete those. The one thing worth adding as you grow is more real examples, not more rationale.
Who should write the brand guidelines?
Whoever will maintain them, which usually means one named person rather than a team. An in-house writer beats an agency on one thing: the examples are real sentences from shipped work. Outside help is worth it for the mechanical half — token naming, contrast floors, the fallback chain, application templates — and for the willingness to delete sections you were attached to.
Do brand guidelines have to be a PDF?
No, and a PDF is the worst of the options for a product company: engineering re-types every value by hand, and the copy in the code becomes a second brand within a month. Markdown in the repo, a page in the team wiki, and Figma variables as the source of truth all work. Whatever the format, the values have to be copyable, and a change has to be announceable.
When does a startup need brand guidelines?
The week the answers stop being obvious to everyone — the first contractor, the first non-founder engineer, or the first time two pages of your own site disagree. Before that a paragraph in the README is enough. After it, every week without a written rule costs a small correction somewhere, and those corrections are what quietly become a redesign.
Want the filled-in version?
A brand identity engagement here ships this document completed — tokens in Figma variables, the same file in Markdown, applications as templates your team can open — with published pricing and fixed scope. Or send a URL for a free 15-minute audit first and we will tell you which of the eleven sections you are actually missing.
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