Brand style guide development in Toronto

In Ontario, accessibility is a legal duty for many organisations, and brand guidelines are where that duty either gets built in or gets ignored. The Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act and its Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation set the rules. Designers rarely read them. The people who approve the brand should.

The web requirement is the part that touches design most directly. Public sector bodies and private or non-profit organisations with 50 or more employees in Ontario must make their public websites and web content conform to WCAG 2.0 level AA, with narrow exceptions for live captions and pre-recorded audio description. That is a named, testable standard. Guidelines can refer to it by name and version instead of vague promises about inclusive design.

Two numbers from that standard belong on the colour page. Normal text needs a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 against its background, and large text needs 3 to 1. WCAG 2.0 treats large as roughly 18 point, or 14 point in bold, and sets no fixed minimum size, though text must still resize to twice its size without breaking. Print the ratio beside each approved pair, so nobody has to test the palette again.

The regulation reaches beyond the website. Organisations must provide accessible formats and communication supports when a person asks for them, in a reasonable time. That covers reports, forms, brochures and PDFs. If the guidelines supply templates that are accessible from the start, with real heading styles, a logical reading order, tagged tables and fields for alt text, a request becomes a quick export instead of a rebuild.

Alt text needs brand rules because people write it in the brand voice. The guidelines should say who writes it, how long it runs, and how it treats the logo. A logo that links to the homepage takes the destination as its alternative text. A logo used as decoration next to the company name takes none.

Feedback channels are also covered. Organisations must let the public give feedback in accessible ways, which affects the design of contact forms, phone lines listed in print and the email address in the footer. A brand that shows its contact details only in an image, or in a pale grey line of small type, fails that test before anyone reads the words.

Finally, the guidelines should record who is accountable. The act asks many organisations to keep an accessibility plan and to file compliance reports. A short page naming the owner of accessibility questions, the contrast checker the team uses and the date of the last review gives that report something concrete to point to.

Brand guidelines usually cover the voice in broad strokes. Warm, direct, confident. Then a product manager writes a release note and has to decide whether the product name takes a capital, whether the plan is called Pro or PRO, and how to write a date. The voice chapter cannot answer that. A house style sheet can.

Start with names, because they cause the most visible errors. List the exact form of the company name, every product name, every plan and every feature that customers see. Show the capitals, the spacing and whether a name ever takes an article. Say what happens in a sentence that starts with a lowercase product name. Decide once, and stop the debate in every meeting.

Trademarked names need an extra line. State whether the registered symbol appears, where it appears and how often. A common rule is first prominent use on a page only. Another is never in running text. Either works. Inconsistency does not.

Numbers come next. Spell out small numbers or use figures, write prices with or without decimals, place the currency sign before or after, separate thousands with a comma or a space. Pick a date format and a time format and show them in examples. Readers notice when a pricing page and an invoice disagree.

Capital letters deserve a short rule of their own. Sentence case for headings and buttons, or title case. Job titles capitalised or not. Department names treated as proper nouns or as descriptions. Teams split on these questions constantly. A single line settles each one.

Include a word list. It holds the terms the organisation uses and the ones it avoids. Sign in rather than log in, customer rather than user, email as one word. Add abbreviations too, with a rule for when each one is spelled out in full. New staff learn more from this list than from any page on brand personality.

Keep the sheet short and searchable. A plain web page or a shared document with a table of contents works better than a designed PDF, because people look up one answer at a time. Link to it from the writing templates, the content management system and the onboarding checklist.

Give it an owner. Someone has to rule on new cases, add the answer and tell the people who write most. Without an owner the sheet freezes at launch. With one it grows into the reference that writers, designers and developers all quietly depend on.