Key answer: The best brand manual examples come from cultural institutions and city brands, because they often publish their manuals as public PDFs. A good manual covers logo versions, clear space, minimum sizes, colours (CMYK, RGB, HEX, Pantone), typography and examples of incorrect use. Extended identity systems add composition rules for materials, print formats and social media – one of our clients' manuals runs to over 200 pages.
Table of contents
- 01The short answer
- 02Example 1: three brands, one system – the Coal Mining Museum in Zabrze
- 03Example 2: a compact manual with bilingual typography – Sinfonietta Cracovia
- 04Example 3: a tourist route identity – Miasta Gwarków
- 05How to read other brands' manuals (a checklist)
- 06From an example to your own manual
The short answer
The best brand manual examples come from cultural institutions and city brands: museums, orchestras and tourist routes often publish their manuals as PDFs, because partners, media and printers rely on them. In this article we show three examples from our own practice – from a compact orchestra manual to a 200-plus-page identity system serving three brands at once. For each one, we point out what to look at so you can turn other brands' manuals into conclusions for your own. If you're after definitions and prices first, start with Brand manual – what it is, what it contains and what it costs.
Example 1: three brands, one system – the Coal Mining Museum in Zabrze
The largest manual I've worked on serves three brands at once: the Coal Mining Museum in Zabrze, the Guido Mine and the Queen Louise Adit. Each brand has its own mark and its own colour (black for the museum, teal for Guido, red for the Adit), and the system binds them with a shared industrial character. The 2021 edition runs to over 200 pages.
What should you look for in manuals like this? Three things that separate a system from a pile of logos:
Composition rules, not just the mark. The MGW manual describes construction grids for materials in specific formats: square compositions for social media, portrait A4, A5 and DL for print, roll-ups and billboards. A designer gets not just a logo but a recipe for the whole piece.
Colour as information. Each brand's own colour (the so-called tag) lets you tell a Guido poster from an Adit poster across the corridor. It's a rule any company with a few product lines can borrow.
Co-branding. A separate chapter governs pairing the mark with the name of the city of Zabrze: where the name sits, in which colour, on which background. If your brand appears next to partners or patrons, this element will save you dozens of debates.
We tell the story of this project in the Coal Mining Museum in Zabrze case study.
Example 2: a compact manual with bilingual typography – Sinfonietta Cracovia
The Sinfonietta Cracovia mark, which we designed in 2019 together with Agnieszka Wróblewska, is a baton cutting through a circle. The manual is compact, but it solves a problem every bilingual brand faces: the mark exists in 10 versions (2 languages × 5 variants), and the manual says precisely when to reach for which.
The thing to borrow here is the rule of variants: instead of one logo "for everything", a full set of versions (horizontal, vertical, the mark alone, language versions) with clear selection rules. Since 2019 the system has held together more than 50 projects – posters, concert programmes, seasonal materials – and that is the real test of a brand manual. Not "does it look nice", but "do projects made by different hands still look like one brand".
More in the Sinfonietta Cracovia case study.
Example 3: a tourist route identity – Miasta Gwarków
Miasta Gwarków is a tourism brand for an industrial heritage route, for which we designed the full identity: the mark, typography, colours and rules for the whole system of media, from print to screen. A tourism brand's manual has to anticipate unusual applications: wayfinding in the field, partners' materials, publications.
The thing to note: rules for media that don't exist yet. A good manual doesn't list every possible material; it gives rules (grid, clear space, typographic hierarchy) from which each new piece follows. That way the document doesn't age with the first new leaflet. Details in the Miasta Gwarków case study.
How to read other brands' manuals (a checklist)
When browsing examples, judge them as instruction manuals, not albums:
- After 5 minutes, do you know which logo version to use on a dark background? If not, the manual doesn't work.
- Are the colours specified in every space (CMYK for print, RGB and HEX for screens, Pantone for special printing)?
- Are there examples of incorrect use? A page of crossed-out, stretched and recoloured marks prevents most disasters.
- Is the clear space defined as a multiple of the mark's module, not in millimetres? Only then does it scale with the logo.
- Does the manual anticipate the brand's life – co-branding, social media, ad formats – or does it end at the business card?
From an example to your own manual
Other brands' manuals calibrate expectations well, but they can't be copied: clear space follows from the construction of a specific mark, and a palette from the context of a specific brand. As part of an identity project, a brand manual usually costs €1,200–3,500 net; you'll find the full price ranges on our brand identity and design systems service page. We also prepare every manual in a format AI tools understand – we explain why in A brand book AI can read.
Curious what a manual like this would look like for your brand? Tell us about your project.