How to Create a Brand Style Guide (and Keep AI Output On Brand)

A brand style guide is the short document that fixes how your brand looks and sounds, and on VdoBloom you build the working version of it in the Brand Kit: paste your website, let the tool draft the kit, then edit and save the name, logo, three colours, tone, font feel, audience and standing offers. From then on that kit pre-fills the ad and social tools, so every AI generation starts from your brand instead of from scratch.

Updated October 2026.

What a brand style guide has to contain

Most published brand guidelines run to forty pages, but the part an AI tool can actually use is much smaller. There are seven things, and if you can answer all seven you will get consistent output:

Name and logo. The exact spelling of your brand name, and the logo file you want shown.
Three colours. A primary, a secondary and an accent. Three is enough to make a design look deliberate; more than three and the output starts to look random.
Tone. How you sound in words — warm, playful, premium, blunt, technical.
Font feel. Not a font file, but a description: a clean rounded sans-serif, a high-contrast serif, a condensed grotesque.
What you sell. One line, in plain language.
Audience. Who the marketing is aimed at.
Standing offers. The promises you repeat constantly — free delivery over a threshold, cash on delivery, a trial, a guarantee.

Everything else in a formal brand manual — clear space rules, photography direction, grid systems — is for a human designer. The seven items above are what an image or copy model can act on.

Why AI output drifts without one

Generative models have no memory of your brand between runs. Ask for ten social graphics without a kit and you get ten different colour palettes, ten typographic moods and ten tones of voice, because each prompt is interpreted fresh. The result is not bad individually; it is inconsistent collectively, and inconsistency is what makes a feed look amateur.

A saved brand kit solves that by fixing the inputs. The colours stop being whatever the model guesses and become your three hex choices. The tone stops being neutral and becomes the words you wrote. Across a month of posting, that is the difference between a recognisable account and a random collection of images.

Building your kit on VdoBloom

The Brand Kit is a save-only tool: it does not spend credits, because it does not generate anything. It reads, stores and reuses.

Start from your website. Paste your site address and press Read. The tool fetches one page — the title, the colours, the icons and the offers on it — and drafts a kit from them. Nothing is stored until you press Save, so you can read as many pages as you like while deciding.
Correct the brand name. The field takes up to 80 characters. Fix the capitalisation now; it is the string that will appear in generated artwork.
Set the logo. Upload a square PNG, which is what reads best when the logo is placed small in the corner of an ad, or take the image the tool pulled from your website. The Brand Kit does not generate a logo — if you do not have one yet, make it first and bring it back here.
Pick three colours. Primary, secondary and accent. If the website draft got them wrong, correct them by hand. Choose the accent for things you want noticed: prices, buttons, call-outs.
Write the tone. Three adjectives, the kind you would use describing a person: warm, playful, premium. Avoid “professional” and “modern”, which describe nothing.
Describe the font feel. For example, a clean rounded sans-serif, or a condensed high-contrast serif. This is a description, not a font name, and the model uses it to choose something in the right family.
Add what you sell and your audience. One line each. These two fields are what stop a generic ad from being generated for an audience you do not have.
List your standing offers, one per line. These are the lines your ads are allowed to use. Be specific and only include claims you can honour.
Save, then mark the brand as the default. Saved brands are listed with their colour swatches. The default one is what pre-fills your other tools, and you can keep several brands and switch between them.

Where the kit is applied

Once a brand is saved and set as default, it carries into the other design tools. The social media designer shows a brand kit selector and pre-selects your default, so the colours, tone and brand name are already filled in when you start a post. The advertising tools in the same suite — the creative pack, the listing set, the user-generated-content ad tool, the ad variants and the advertisement tool — read the same default brand.

That is the practical payoff. You resolve the brand decisions once, in one place, and every generation after it inherits them. If you later change the accent colour, you change it in the kit rather than fixing a hundred images.

Prompt and copy examples

A brand kit is not a prompt, but it shapes the prompt you write. Here is how the same request changes depending on the kit behind it.

Generic: “A social post announcing a new product.”
With a kit: “A social post announcing a new product launch, using our primary green on a cream background, minimal layout, our logo small in the corner, brand name set in a clean rounded sans-serif, tone warm and understated.”
Offer-led: “A promotion post built around our standing offer of free delivery over the threshold, accent colour used only for the offer line, everything else quiet.”
Audience-led: “A post aimed at first-time buyers, avoiding technical language, warm palette, one clear call to action.”

Common mistakes

Picking six colours. Three force decisions. More than three and the model starts improvising.
Writing vague tone words. “Professional” or “modern” gives the model nothing to act on. “Direct, warm, no exclamation marks” gives it a lot.
Uploading a landscape logo. Square PNGs read best at the small sizes the tools place them at.
Listing offers you cannot repeat. Standing offers are reused in generated copy, so a promise you cannot keep gets printed again and again.
Filling in the kit once and never revisiting it. Re-read it each quarter; brands drift and the kit is the thing that stops it.
Expecting the kit to generate assets. It stores direction. The generating happens in the other tools, and those charge credits; the Brand Kit does not.

If your logo is the missing piece, the AI logo creator guide covers making one, and once it exists here, the social media designer is the fastest way to see the kit applied. For a fuller set of finished ads from the same brand, see the static ad creative pack and our UGC ad workflow. Every tool that spends credits shows the exact cost before you run it, and the plans page explains the allowances.

Frequently asked questions

What is a brand style guide in one sentence?

It is the reference that fixes how your brand looks and sounds — name, logo, colours, tone, type and standing offers — so that everything you publish looks like it came from the same company. A short working version beats a long document nobody opens.

Does the Brand Kit cost credits?

No. The Brand Kit reads your website and stores what you save, but it does not generate images, so there is nothing to charge for. Credits are spent in the tools that render output, and those show the cost before you press generate.

Can VdoBloom design my logo in the Brand Kit?

No, and the tool is clear about that. You either upload a square PNG or use the image the tool pulled from your website. Logo generation is a separate tool, and you bring the finished file back into the kit.

How does the kit keep AI output on brand?

By pre-filling the inputs. When a kit is set as the default, the design and advertising tools open with your colours, brand name and tone already in place, and the default brand is selected automatically. That removes the moment where a model would otherwise invent a palette and a voice of its own.

How many colours should a brand guide have?

Three: one primary that carries most of the surface, one secondary for support, and one accent reserved for what you want noticed. Three is also the number the Brand Kit stores, which keeps the constraint built in.

Set yours up once and it pays back on every post. Open the Brand Kit, paste your website address, correct what the draft got wrong, save it and mark it as the default — it costs nothing to do.