Brand style guide development in Sunnyvale

Generative AI tools now let almost anyone produce a passable marketing image in minutes. A guidelines document written before these tools existed says nothing about them. That leaves a real gap. Somebody on the marketing team will use one anyway, guidelines or not.

The first rule to write down is scope. State plainly which materials may include an AI-generated image and which may not. A blog header is low stakes. Experimenting there is fine. A product photo on a pricing page, where a customer expects to see the real product, is not.

Color accuracy is the most common failure point. An AI image generator rarely reproduces an exact brand color from a text prompt alone. Check it. Guidelines should require that any AI-generated background or graphic get checked against the approved palette afterward, and adjusted, rather than trusting the tool to match a hex code on the first try.

Logo generation deserves its own flat rule: never. Asking a generative tool to draw or recreate the company mark produces something close enough to pass a glance and wrong enough to matter, with letterforms that shift slightly or a symbol that drifts from the approved file. The real file gets placed afterward. Every time. Not generated alongside the image.

Human review before publication is not optional. AI output can include a stray watermark from a training image, a distorted hand or object, or text that looks like a real word until someone reads it closely. A short checklist helps. One person who did not generate the image reviews it and catches most of these before a customer does.

Disclosure is worth deciding once, in writing, rather than case by case. Some contexts call for a visible note that an image was AI-assisted; others do not need one at all. Put the rule in the guidelines. A marketer should not be left guessing under a deadline, and two campaigns should not handle the same situation two different ways.

None of this should read as a ban. Treated as one more image source, with the same review standard applied to a stock photo, an AI-generated image can save real time on low-stakes material. The guidelines exist so that time saved on one image does not become time lost fixing a color mismatch on twenty others.

A logo dragged by one corner in a slide deck stretches instantly. Almost nobody notices until the file is already sent. Guidelines rarely spell out why this matters or what to do about it. The correction is left to whoever happens to catch the mistake.

The simplest rule is one sentence: resize only from a corner handle, never a side handle, so height and width change together. Most design software respects this automatically once a file is locked. Plenty of everyday tools do not lock anything by default. Neither do most slide decks.

Digital platforms complicate this further. A social network cropping a square profile photo out of a wide logo file will squash proportions without asking permission first. A content management system fitting a logo into a fixed banner slot can do the same. The fix is a set of pre-built size variants. Each one is already proportioned correctly for a specific slot, so nobody relies on a platform to scale it correctly on the fly.

Minimum and maximum size need separate answers. Viewing distance matters as much as screen size. A logo on a business card sits close to the reader. The same file on a trade show banner sits many feet away, and needs a different minimum size to stay legible, even though both are technically print.

A single master file avoids most of this. Build it at high resolution. Save it in a format that scales without quality loss. Teams that keep resizing an old low-resolution export inherit a slightly blurrier logo every time. After a few generations of copying, aspect ratio drift becomes the least of the problems.

The rule that saves the most trouble long-term is refusing manual reconstruction outright. Nobody should redraw the mark by eye. Not to fit an odd space, not for any reason. A slightly smaller version of the real file, with extra padding around it, always beats a hand-adjusted approximation that looks close but is not quite right.

None of this needs to be complicated. A short line about corner-only resizing, a small set of ready-made size variants, and one firm rule against redrawing the mark cover most of what actually goes wrong in practice.