Anyone can get the logo page right. The real test of a brand guide is whether it remembered the email signature — and the virtual background, and the alt text, and the social image specs. The forgotten pages are where brands actually leak. This is the checklist that finds the gaps before they do.
A while back, someone pointed us to Stanford’s identity site — specifically its guidance for email signatures — and it stuck with us. Of course a great institution standardizes its email signatures. Every person on staff sends dozens of emails a day, each one ending in a tiny, repeated act of branding. And yet the email signature is exactly the kind of thing most guides forget. It isn’t glamorous. It doesn’t make the cover. So it slips through — and the brand frays one signature at a time.
That’s the whole thesis of this post: a style guide is only as good as its most-forgotten page. The logo lockups and the color palette are table stakes; nearly everyone gets those right. Brands don’t leak at the front door. They leak at the out-of-office reply, the conference Zoom background, the un-alt-texted Instagram post, the report template nobody made so everyone improvised.
So here’s a checklist you can actually print and hold up against your own guide. It’s grouped the way a real brand system is — and it maps to the layers we untangled in our companion piece, The Best Brand & Style Guides in Higher Education (Expression, Words, Identity & structure, Rules & policy, and System). Work through it, tick the boxes, and pay special attention to the items we’ve flagged (often forgotten) — that’s where the gaps live.
One thread runs through every group below: accessibility. It isn’t a section at the end. It’s a line in each room of the house — contrast in color, legible sizes in type, alt text in imagery, link text in writing. The best programs shift left and build it in early, where it’s cheap and invisible, instead of catching it in an audit after something ships. We’ve folded an accessible-by-default note into each group rather than quarantining it. Pull accessibility out of any one of these and you’ve left a door unlocked.
1. Logo & marks
- Primary logo — the master mark, in its definitive form
- Secondary / alternate marks — horizontal, stacked, and icon-only variants
- Wordmark — the name set in its official type, and the rule that it’s artwork, not a font nobody rebuilds by hand
- Lockups — fixed, governed combinations for sub-brands, departments, partnerships
- Clear space — the protected margin around the mark, defined by a unit of the logo itself
- Minimum size — smallest legible size in print (mm/in) and on screen (px)
- One-color & reverse versions — how the mark behaves in black, white, and knocked out on dark
- Misuse don’ts — don’t stretch, recolor, add effects, place on busy photos, rebuild
- Favicon & app icon (often forgotten) — the 16px-to-512px square crop that lives in browser tabs, bookmarks, and phone home screens. The smallest version of your brand, and the one that has to survive being tiny.
- Accessible-by-default: every mark stays legible at minimum size and survives in a single color, so it works for low-vision viewers and in low-fidelity contexts.
2. Color
- Primary palette — the core brand colors
- Secondary / accent palette — the supporting range, with guidance on proportion (how much of each)
- Exact values for every color — HEX, RGB, CMYK, and Pantone, so screen and print match
- Neutrals — the grays, off-whites, and ink colors that do the quiet 80% of the work
- Accessible color pairings (often forgotten) — not just “the colors,” but which combinations are allowed. Specify approved text-on-background pairings that clear WCAG AA contrast (4.5:1 for body text, 3:1 for large text), and call out the pretty-but-illegal pairings explicitly so nobody discovers them the hard way.
- Accessible-by-default: never encode meaning in color alone (add a label, icon, or pattern), and give every brand color a documented accessible partner.
3. Typography
- Primary & secondary typefaces — display and text, with the rationale for each
- Weights & styles — which weights are licensed and in play, and which are off-limits
- Web fallbacks — the system-font stack for when the brand face can’t load, so the page never breaks
- Type scale — a defined hierarchy (H1 → caption) rather than ad-hoc sizes
- Pairing & spacing rules — line-height, tracking, and how the two faces work together
- Minimum sizes for legibility (often forgotten) — the smallest size body text is ever allowed to be (a practical floor around 16px on web), so legibility isn’t sacrificed to fit copy in a tight space.
- Accessible-by-default: real, selectable text over text-in-images; generous line spacing; type that holds up when a reader zooms to 200%.
4. Voice & messaging
- Brand voice — the constant personality (e.g., warm, plainspoken, a little mythic) that never changes
- Tone — how that voice flexes by context: celebratory at a launch, steady in a service outage
- Boilerplate — the approved “about us” paragraph, in short and long forms
- Elevator pitch / positioning — the one-line and one-paragraph answer to “what is this?”
- Key messages — the three-to-five things you always want to land
- Words we use / words we don’t — preferred language and the terms to avoid
- Accessible-by-default: plain language as a brand value — short sentences, defined jargon, and writing a tired reader (or a screen reader) can follow.
5. Editorial & content style
- House style vs. AP — which standard you follow, and where you deviate on purpose
- Capitalization — titles, headlines, program and department names
- Numbers, dates, times — when to spell out, how to format
- Punctuation calls — the Oxford comma, em dashes, ampersands
- Naming conventions — official names of schools, products, programs, events (and their short forms)
- Your own tricky terms (often forgotten) — the institution-specific words people spell or style three different ways: alumni/alumnae/alums, your sub-brand capitalizations, that one program with the unusual name. A short in-house word list ends more arguments than any rulebook.
- Accessible-by-default: guidance on writing meaningful link text (“View the 2026 budget,” never “click here”) and on expanding acronyms on first use.
6. Imagery & iconography
- Photography style — the look: candid vs. posed, lighting, color treatment, what “feels like us”
- Photo do’s & don’ts — with real examples, not just adjectives
- Art direction — framing, subjects, authenticity guidance (including any AI-imagery policy)
- Icon set — the approved library, style (line vs. filled), grid, and stroke weight
- Illustration — when and how custom illustration is used
- Alt-text guidance (often forgotten) — how to write good alternative text (describe meaning, not “image of”; keep decorative images empty) so every image is usable by screen-reader users. This is the single most-skipped accessibility item, and it lives here, in the imagery chapter, where the people choosing pictures will see it.
- Image rights & licensing (often forgotten) — where approved photos live, what’s cleared for which uses, model-release requirements, and expiration dates. The legal landmine hiding inside the pretty photo library.
- Accessible-by-default: alt text on everything meaningful; captions kept legible; never rely on an image to carry information that isn’t also in text.
7. Templates & everyday assets
This is the group teams most often under-build — and the one staff reach for most. Templates are where the system meets the person at 4:55 on a Friday.
- Slide decks — title, section, and content layouts, on-brand and ready to fill
- Letterhead — print and digital
- Business cards — with a fill-in spec, not a one-off design per request
- Email signatures — the canonical example. One approved format, with rules for name, title, unit, and which links are allowed — so 5,000 inboxes look like one organization.
- Virtual / Zoom backgrounds (often forgotten) — branded, approved backgrounds for video calls and webinars. In a hybrid world this is a primary brand surface, and almost no guide accounts for it.
- Out-of-office templates (often forgotten) — a tiny, repeated, public-facing message most guides never touch.
- Social graphic templates — sized per platform, with safe zones marked
- One-pagers / fact sheets — a reusable shell for the documents people make constantly
- Report & brochure templates (often forgotten) — the long-form documents (annual reports, program brochures) that get improvised from scratch every time because nobody made a starting point.
- Accessible-by-default: templates ship already accessible — proper heading order in decks, real text not screenshots, alt-text placeholders, AA-passing color built in — so the easy path is the correct one.
8. Social media
Two documents, not one — and they answer different questions.
- Social Media Guide — how to show up: voice on each platform, post formats, hashtags, response style, posting cadence
- Social Media Policy — who’s allowed and what’s required: account authorization, approval chains, compliance and crisis response, what happens when rules are broken
- Per-platform image specs — exact dimensions and safe zones for each network (they change; date them)
- Captions & alt text on social (often forgotten) — alt text and meaningful captions on social posts, not just the website. A social post and a brochure deserve the same accessibility care the homepage gets — accessibility doesn’t stop at the edge of your domain.
- Accessible-by-default: alt text on every posted image, captions on every video, sparing emoji (screen readers read each one aloud), and CamelCase hashtags (#FirstGenStudents) so they’re readable.
9. Web & digital
- Web standards — required platforms, URL/domain conventions, who may publish
- Components / design tokens — reusable UI pieces and your brand values encoded as named, machine-readable tokens (
color-gold: #f4c44c), so the guide and the live site can’t drift apart - Accessibility standard (WCAG 2.1 AA) — stated as the explicit bar, covering alt text, visible focus states, keyboard navigation, and contrast
- Forms & interaction patterns — labels, error states, and validation done accessibly
- Email / newsletter templates (often forgotten) — the branded, responsive, accessible email shell, separate from the website system, that marketing and comms use weekly.
- Accessible-by-default: WCAG 2.1 AA isn’t a footnote here — it’s encoded in the components, so the right thing is the default thing and you can’t easily ship the wrong one.
10. Brand architecture
- The relationship model — how schools, departments, centers, and sub-brands relate to the parent
- Naming conventions — what each unit is called, and how that name is styled
- Lockups per tier — the approved, governed mark for each level of the hierarchy
- Endorsement rules — when a unit leads with its own name vs. the parent brand
- Accessible-by-default: every lockup, at every tier, stays legible small and in a single color.
11. Governance & access
A guide nobody can find — or edit, or get a file from — isn’t a system; it’s a museum.
- Approval workflow — who signs off on what, and how to request a review
- Asset library — where logos, fonts, photos, and templates live and how to download them
- File-naming conventions (often forgotten) — a shared scheme (
viv-logo-primary-rgb.svg) so the right file is findable and the wrong one isn’t lurking in someone’s downloads folder. - Version control — what’s current, what’s retired, and how people know
- Onboarding for new hires & vendors (often forgotten) — a “start here” path so a new employee or freelance designer is on-brand on day one instead of guessing for a month. The brand is only as consistent as its newest contributor.
- Accessible-by-default: the guide itself is accessible and easy to navigate, so following it is never the hard path.
12. Motion & sound (if applicable)
- Motion principles — how the brand moves: easing, timing, entrances, the feel
- Logo animation — the one approved way the mark animates, and the don’ts
- Audio / sonic logo — any signature sound, and where it’s used
- Accessible-by-default: honor reduced-motion preferences, never autoplay sound, and caption any spoken audio.
The 10 most-forgotten items
Print this and check your own guide. If you’re missing more than a couple, you’ve found where your brand is quietly leaking:
- Email signature — one approved format for every inbox
- Virtual / Zoom background — a real brand surface now
- Alt text — how to write it, on every meaningful image
- Accessible color pairings — which combinations clear WCAG AA
- Social image specs — per-platform sizes and safe zones, dated
- Link text — “view the report,” never “click here”
- Out-of-office template — a tiny, public, repeated message
- Favicon & app icon — the smallest version of you
- File naming & asset access — so the right file is findable
- Onboarding — a “start here” for new hires and vendors
A checklist is the start. A living system is how it stays done.
Here’s the catch with any checklist, this one included: you can tick every box on a Tuesday and watch the brand drift again by Friday. A printed list is a snapshot. The work it describes is continuous — new hires arrive, platforms change their image specs, someone invents a virtual background on the fly. The gaps don’t stay closed because you closed them once.
That’s the difference a living system makes. When your email-signature format, your social specs, your accessible color pairings, and your alt-text rules all live in one place that travels with your team — and when your colors are real design tokens instead of hex codes in a PDF — the checklist stops being a thing you re-run and starts being a thing that’s simply true. The forgotten pages can’t be forgotten if the system won’t let them be.
That’s what we build with Viv BrandOS: a brand guide that reads like a story and behaves like a system — every color a click-to-copy token, every type page a live specimen, accessibility checked by the tool itself rather than promised in a footnote. The checklist above is how you find the gaps. BrandOS is how you keep them closed.
If your guidelines are a PDF nobody opens — or a checklist you keep meaning to finish — let’s talk. We equip our clients with powerful tools to support their missions. A guide that remembers the email signature should be one of them.
External links above were checked at the time of writing (June 2026): Stanford Identity and its email-signature guidance both resolve (HTTP 200). The WCAG standard referenced throughout is WCAG 2.1 AA, published by the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (w3.org/WAI); the W3C blocks automated link-checkers, so that URL returned a 403 to our crawler but is the correct, stable canonical address. If any deep link 404s, start from the organization’s main domain — institutional sites move pages occasionally. The checklist itself is editorial and meant to be adapted to your team.