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A brand guideline is your house style, saved in one place: colors, fonts, logos, and how your company does and doesn’t speak. Set it up first, because every other generator reads it. Unlike a PDF in a shared drive, this one is read by the tools that build your content, so they follow it without being reminded.

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Create a brand guideline

You can start from just your website, or add a written description and a brand document. Each one adds something the others can’t.
1

Start the extractor

In Content, select Create and choose Brand Guidelines Extractor.
The Brand Guidelines Extractor dialog

The Brand Guidelines Extractor asks for a name and up to three sources.

2

Add your sources

Name the guideline, then add your sources. A website URL alone is enough to start:
  • Website URL: your main marketing site. A marketing page works better than a login screen or a docs site, because it shows more of your brand.
  • Brand Description: a few sentences in your own words. Use it for anything a website can’t show, such as “we never use exclamation points.” It’s also where you settle conflicts between your other sources. For example: “When the website branding and Design Pack are in conflict, let the Design Pack win as it is newer.”
  • Brand Document: upload an existing brand guide, such as a PDF.
The Brand Description is also where you settle conflicts. For example: “When the website branding and Design Pack are in conflict, let the Design Pack win as it is newer.”
3

Select Start

allGood reads your sources and builds the guideline. When it finishes, the new brand guideline appears in your Content library as a draft.
4

Review what it found

Open the guideline. The Summary view shows everything it found, in five sections:
  • Colors: your palette.
  • Type: your display, heading, and body fonts.
  • Voice: your tone, energy, and audience.
  • Images: your logo variants and image style. A slot marked “Not in this bundle” means allGood didn’t find one.
  • Guidelines: a written guide that pulls it all together.
Read Voice most carefully. You can check colors and fonts at a glance and fix them later. Voice shapes the copy that comes out of every other generator.
The Summary view of a brand guideline

The Summary view of a brand guideline.

5

Publish it

Select Publish at the top right. The first version is published. Later changes are published the same way. You now have a published version, and the guideline shows it in the Versions list.Publishing matters because the content you build later records which version of the brand it used. A published brand is the version the rest of your content is locked to.
You’re done when the guideline shows a published version in the Versions list and the Summary view lists your colors, type, voice and images.

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Find your way around the guideline

The sidebar groups what you can do with a brand guideline.

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Set your default brand

Select Make default on the guideline you want most content to use. It becomes the brand already selected when you build something like a motion, so you don’t have to choose it every time.

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Change a guideline later

Every change creates a new version. The Versions list shows each one, oldest to newest. For any version you can:
  • Preview it, to see what it looked like.
  • Roll back to it, if a change was a mistake.
To rebrand, make your edits and publish the new version. Every email and page built on the brand recorded which version it used, so a newly published brand shows each of them as out of date. You get a list of what needs revisiting instead of a guess. See Publishing and versions for how to read that list.

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What’s in a brand guideline’s files

Behind the Summary view, a brand guideline is a bundle of files. Open the Files tab next to Context to see them.
The Files tab for a brand guideline, listing logo, favicon, and data files

The Files tab for allGood's own brand guideline, cropped. The full list is longer.

Some of these files are made for you, and some you add. Made by the extractor:
  • branding.json holds your colors, fonts, and voice in a form other generators can read.
  • content.md is the written guide shown in the Guidelines section.
  • .inputs keeps the sources you gave it, and .versions keeps earlier versions.
Added by you: the logo and favicon files in this screenshot weren’t created automatically. The allGood team added them to our own guideline. The extractor picks up the logos it can find on your site, and you can add the rest.

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Add files to a guideline

You can add files in two ways:
  • In the Workshop. Open Author > Workshop and add the files there.
  • From an AI assistant. Connect one to your allGood library and it can work with your brand directly.
This is separate from uploading a visual asset. Files you add to a brand guideline stay inside it as part of the brand. A visual asset is its own item in your library.

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Why our example has both PNG and SVG

We added every logo twice, plus a few color versions, so that whatever builds on the brand has the right file for the job:
  • SVG is a drawing instead of a grid of pixels, so it stays sharp at any size. It suits headers, banners, and print.
  • PNG is a fixed-size image that works in almost every tool, including email clients that don’t accept SVG.
  • Color versions (full color, black, white, and a standalone mark) mean nobody recolors a logo by hand.
  • Favicons at 32, 180, and 512 pixels cover browser tabs, phone home screens, and larger icon slots.
You don’t need this many files. A guideline works with only what the extractor makes. Add your own logos when you want your approved artwork used instead of whatever is found on your site.

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What reads it

Every content generator takes the brand guideline as an input: emails, landing pages, forms, visual assets, both component libraries, and both kinds of template. That is why doing this first makes everything after it come out on-brand without anyone being told to.
The brand guideline shapes how content is written. It doesn’t supply values at send time. An email doesn’t pull its button color from the brand while it is delivered. The brand shapes the content when you make it, and what is sent is the finished email or page.

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Good to know

  • One brand per account is the normal case. If you run several brands, make one guideline per brand and point each template at the right one.
  • The extractor is a starting point. Correct what it got wrong before you publish it, because everything downstream inherits it.
  • Logos belong in the brand. Add them to the guideline’s files. An image you want to reuse on its own is a visual asset.
  • Combine sources when you can. A website shows what you do today. A brand document shows what you intend. A short description settles the gaps between them.