The Brand Kit Guide: What to Include, With 10 Real Examples

 

You have a logo file, a hex code and a font name. The tenth asset your team ships still doesn't look like the first.

That gap is what a brand kit fixes. Not inspiration, not a folder of files but the assets plus the rules for applying them, so the next person doesn't have to guess.

What follows is the whole job in one page: the definition, what belongs inside, ten brand kit examples with the detail worth copying, a brand kit template you can fill in here, the tool decision most guides skip, and the reason a saved palette alone never holds the line.

 

What Is a Brand Kit?

A brand kit is the set of files and rules that produces on-brand work without a design decision per asset.

It has two halves, and most teams build only the first.

Assets: Logo variants, colour values, typefaces, imagery, and whatever else a layout needs to be built.

Rules: Which logo goes where, which colour pairs are allowed, how much space the mark needs, what never appears, and what a new asset looks like when it's approved.

Without the second half, the first half is a download folder. Anyone can take a colour from a file and still produce something off-brand, because the file doesn't say what to do with it.

That's also the honest answer to what is a brand kit for: it removes the moment where somebody picks a blue by eye.

A brand kit is not a mood board, and it is not a logo pack. It is the layer a tool can apply on your behalf, which matters more once more than one person is making things.

 

What Belongs in a Brand Kit

Eight parts. Each one is a file plus a sentence, and the sentence is the part people skip.

1. Logo variants: Primary, secondary, icon-only, and a one-colour version. For each: clear space, minimum size, and the backgrounds it may sit on.
2. Colour roles: Not a palette of nine swatches. A primary, a secondary, an accent, a background and a text colour, each with its values and the pairs that must never touch.
3. Type scale: A heading face and a body face, with sizes, weights and line heights written out for the formats you actually produce. Two families is usually enough.
4. Layout rules: Grid, margins, where the logo sits by default, how images are cropped, what the corner radius is. Rules that survive a new format.
5. Imagery direction: Who and what appears in photos, how they're treated, which illustrations are allowed, and the stock-photo look to avoid.
6. Voice in five lines: How the brand sounds, how it doesn't, and one before-and-after example of the same sentence. Short beats comprehensive.
7. Approved examples: Two or three finished assets labelled "this is right", and one labelled "this is wrong" with the error named. People copy examples faster than they read rules.
8. Storage and access: One location, the formats, who may edit the kit, and who signs off an exception. A kit nobody can find is not a kit.

An empty slot is worse than a mediocre rule. A mediocre rule gets argued with and improved. An empty slot gets filled by whoever is in a hurry.

 

Brand Kit Examples Worth Copying

Below I describe only what each brand makes publicly visible: its website, packaging, published guidelines or public design system. I haven't seen their internal files, and neither has anyone else writing a list like this.

1. IBM: Its Carbon design system is public, including the IBM Plex typeface and colour tokens such as blue 60 (#0f62fe) used for brand backgrounds and links. The habit to copy: publish tokens with names, not a folder of swatches, so a colour has one job.
2. GOV UK: GDS Transport is the typeface, the crown is the logo, and the visible output is black type on white with a single blue for links. Services on a gov.uk subdomain are required to use GDS Transport. The habit: rules that say who may use the assets, not just what they look like.
3. Spotify: The green logo is set on black or white only, the icon drops the wordmark when space is tight, and there's a defined exclusion zone. Its partner guidance points integrations to system sans-serifs instead of its own typeface. The habit: a separate rule for every background, so the logo is never improvised.
4. Duolingo: One mascot, one bright green, one illustration style across app, ads and social. The habit: a mascot rule makes an asset recognisable when the logo is tiny or absent.
5. Mailchimp: A yellow field and Freddie the chimp carry campaigns even when the wordmark is small. The habit: one secondary asset like a character, a shape, a texture that travels with the brand.
6. Monzo: The card colour appears in the app, the card and the ads. The habit: pick one colour and own it everywhere, including places a designer never touches.
7. Apple: Apple publishes its Human Interface Guidelines and its typefaces, and the visible result is one type family, generous spacing, and very little decoration. The habit: subtract. Fewer choices are easier to keep consistent.
8. Oatly: Flat carton panels, plain typographic layouts, product names in bold. The habit: layout rules strong enough that a new product looks like the range on day one.
9. Notion: A monochrome wordmark, a mostly black-and-white interface, illustrations held to one grey. The habit: a low-colour system, which is the easiest kind to keep consistent across ten people.
10. Airbnb: One symbol and one coral accent, used on every surface from the app icon to the printed key tag. The habit: one mark, one accent, no exceptions to argue about.

Ten brands, ten different answers, one shared pattern: the rule is written down, and it's narrow enough to apply without a meeting.

Copy the rule, not the look. Your palette and typeface are already yours; what's missing is the sentence that says how they're used.

The Brand Kit Template: Build Yours in Order

Build it in this order and the decisions get easier as you go. There's nothing to download here - copy this list into a doc and fill it in, one numbered step at a time.

1. Name it and assign an owner: One person, not a committee. Write their name next to the kit's name.
2. Drop in the logos: Primary, secondary, icon, one-colour. For each file, add clear space and minimum size in pixels and millimetres.
3. Assign colour roles: Write five values: primary, secondary, accent, background, text. Next to each, write where it may appear, and list the pairings you've banned.
4. Set the type scale: Heading family, body family, then a size for each thing you actually produce: H1, H2, body, caption, button. Add line heights while you're there.
5. Write the layout defaults: Margin size, logo position, image crop, corner radius, and the minimum space between elements. Defaults, not preferences.
6. Define the imagery: Three sentences on subjects, two on treatment, and one line on what's banned. Link to two approved photographs.
7. Write the voice, then an example: Five lines on how the brand sounds, one before-and-after pair of the same sentence, and one word you never use.
8. Publish the access rules: Location, formats, editor list, and the route for an exception. Add a review date, because kits rot quietly.

If you get through all eight, you have a brand kit template filled in. If you stall at step 5, that's the answer to why assets keep drifting: the assets exist, the layout defaults don't.

 

How to Make a Brand Kit

Knowing how to make a brand kit that survives a deadline is different from filling in a template. The template is the artefact; this is the process.

1. Audit what already exists: Collect the last twenty assets you shipped. Put them side by side. The inconsistencies you find are the rules you actually need, in priority order.
2. Write the rules you already follow: Most of your brand is tacit. Say it out loud, then write down the version you'd defend to a new hire.
3. Reduce until it's usable: Two typefaces, five colours, four logo variants. Every extra option is a decision someone will get wrong at speed.
4. Build it in the tool your team already uses: A kit in a document is a reference. A kit inside the design tool is an instruction.
5. Test it on a real asset: Make the thing you make most often like a social post, a one-pager, a slide - using only the kit. If you had to reach outside it, the kit has a gap.
6. Share it and set permissions: Give the whole team read access, give two people edit rights, and put the location in your onboarding doc.

That's the loop. Audit, write, reduce, build, test, share.

Tools differ in how much of that they enforce. In Grafista, a Brand Kit is created once and applied when you generate a design, so the brand layer is a setting rather than a set of choices repeated on every asset. The exact contents of a Grafista Brand Kit vary by how you set it up, so plan yours against the eight parts above.

 

Brand Kit vs Brand Guidelines vs Brand Book

Three terms, often used as synonyms, doing different jobs. The confusion costs teams weeks, because they commission the wrong one.

• Brand kit: assets plus the rules a tool applies, for anyone producing an asset, including software, kept as files and settings inside a design tool. It answers "which logo, which colour, which font?"

• Brand guidelines: the written rules for using the brand, for designers, agencies and new hires, usually a shorter document or a web page. It answers "how do I use this correctly?"

• Brand book: the rules plus the thinking behind them: purpose, values, personality, for leadership, partners and big campaigns, in a longer document, often designed. It answers "why does the brand do this at all?"

The practical order matters. A brand kit without guidelines gives you consistency you can't explain. Guidelines without a brand kit give you a document nobody opens on a Friday afternoon. Most small teams need the kit first, a two-page guidelines doc second, and a brand book only when someone outside the company is representing them.

 

How Canva's Brand Kit Works, and Where It Stops

The Canva Brand Kit is a folder inside the editor: logos, colour palettes, fonts, imagery, templates and brand guidelines in one place, applied to designs you build there. Canva's AI can use the kit's colours, fonts and style when generating.

The pricing, as listed on Canva's pricing page on 7 November 2026: Canva Pro includes up to 5 Brand Kits and costs US$12 per month billed annually (US$144 per year), or US$18 month to month for one person, before taxes. The free plan includes one limited Brand Kit.

That's a real improvement over a folder on a shared drive. It's also a storage decision, and it stops at the editor's edge.

• It stores your assets. It doesn't decide your layout: You still choose a template and make your content fit it.
• It's tied to its own templates: The headline that's too long, the photo with the wrong crop. The kit can't fix a layout that was built around someone else's content.
• It applies inside Canva: A design made in another tool, by an agency, or in a slide deck doesn't get the kit's help.
• The free tier caps it: One limited kit is enough to test, not enough to run a team with two sub-brands.

If your problem is "our colours are inconsistent in Canva", the Canva Brand Kit solves it. If your problem is "our fixed templates keep breaking when we add real copy", the fix is a different model, one that applies a style to your content instead of asking you to edit placeholders.

That's the distinction behind how Blueprints work, and it's the same distinction you'd weigh in a full Grafista vs Canva comparison.

On cost, for reference: Grafista's plans and prices start at €10 per month for Basic (1000 credits), with Pro at €18 (2000 credits), Ultra at €40 (5000 credits) and Max at €72 (10000 credits), each listing unlimited brand kits and unlimited users. A startup program takes 50% off any plan for the first three months. Prices read on 7 November 2026.

 

Why a Saved Palette Doesn't Stop Brand Drift

Brand drift is not a colour problem. It's a decisions problem.

Here's the pattern. Asset one is made carefully. Asset ten is made on a Friday by someone who has four other things due, so they pick the nearest blue, use a stock photo with the wrong light, and put the logo bottom-left because it balanced the layout. Asset twenty is made by a freelancer who never saw asset one.

A saved palette changes none of that. It gives everyone the same swatches, and then leaves every layout decision open. Colour consistency goes up, and the deck still doesn't look like it came from the same company.

What stops drift is rules that get applied at the moment a design is generated, not rules that get consulted from memory. That's the whole argument for putting a brand layer inside the tool:

• The rules are read by the software, so they can't be forgotten under deadline.
• Layout is generated from your content, so there's no placeholder to break.
• The tenth asset uses the same inputs as the first, so it comes out looking like it.

In Grafista, Brand Kits hold the brand layer and get applied when a design is generated. Blueprints supply the design logic - typography, spacing, colour rhythm - from a design someone else made. Combine the two and the style is applied to your content rather than your content being squeezed into a file.

A saved palette is a bookmark. A brand kit plus a layout that adapts is closer to a rule. If you want to see the difference on your own copy, create a free account - 300 free credits, no card required.

 

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a brand kit, in one sentence?

It's the package of assets and usage rules that lets anyone produce on-brand work without making design decisions, logos, colours, type, imagery, and the written rules that govern them.

What should be in a brand kit?

Logo variants with clear space and minimum size, five colour roles with values and banned pairings, a type scale, layout defaults, imagery direction, five lines of voice, a couple of approved examples, and the storage and permission rules.

How much does a brand kit cost?

The kit itself is free to build. The cost sits in the tool you keep it in: Canva Pro lists US$12 per month billed annually or US$18 month to month for one person, with up to 5 Brand Kits, and Grafista's plans run from €10 to €72 per month with unlimited brand kits on every plan. Hiring someone to build the rules is where the real money goes.

How long does it take to make one?

A first usable version takes an afternoon if the brand already exists: audit twenty assets, write the rules you follow, reduce the options, build it in your tool. The guidelines document takes longer than the kit.

Do I need a brand kit if I work alone?

Yes, if you produce marketing material regularly. The person most likely to drift from your brand is you in six months, with no memory of which blue you used.

What's the difference between a brand kit and brand guidelines?

The kit is the assets plus the rules a tool applies. Guidelines are the written rules a person reads. Most teams need both, and the kit is the one that gets used daily.

 

Sources

All sources read on 7 November 2026. Brand examples describe publicly visible material only like websites, packaging, published guidelines and public design systems.

• Canva pricing - https://www.canva.com/pricing/ (plan limits and prices)
• Canva Brand Kit, Canva Pro - https://www.canva.com/pro/brand-kit/ and https://www.canva.com/help/brand-kit/ (what the kit stores)
• Grafista pricing - https://grafista.io/pricing (plans, credits, unlimited brand kits, startup program)
• Grafista, "Meet Brand Kits" - https://grafista.io/blog/posts/meet-brand-kits (creating and applying a Brand Kit)
• Grafista, "Meet Blueprints" - https://grafista.io/blog/posts/blueprints (style applied to content rather than a template)
• GOV.UK Brand Guidelines, typography - https://brand.design-system.service.gov.uk/typography/ and https://design-system.service.gov.uk/styles/typeface/ (GDS Transport)
• IBM Carbon Design System, colour tokens and typography - https://www.carbondesignsystem.com/building-blocks/foundations/color/tokens (blue 60) and https://www.carbondesignsystem.com/building-blocks/foundations/typography/overview (IBM Plex)
• Spotify for Developers, design and branding guidelines - https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/design (logo backgrounds, exclusion zone, partner typefaces)