Writing a Brand Guidelines Document

Why you need a written guide

FRC teams lose a meaningful share of their members to graduation every year. Without a written brand guidelines document (also called a style guide or brand book), the identity you built drifts: someone uses the wrong blue, a rookie squishes the logo, slides start showing up in Comic Sans. A written guide is what keeps that from happening. Judges also like to see one, because it is evidence of sustainability, a core theme of the Impact Award.

What a good guide contains

1. Logo usage: the master logo, the approved variations (horizontal, stacked, icon-only), the minimum size, and the required clear space, which is the empty margin that stays around the logo. Show what not to do as well: don’t stretch the logo, recolor it, add shadows, or place it on a busy background.
2. Color palette: swatches with HEX, RGB, CMYK, and Pantone values, plus a note on which colors are primary and which are accents.
3. Typography. Heading and body fonts, sizes, and fallbacks.
4. Imagery style. What your photos look like, whether that’s bright, action-focused, or something else.
5. Voice and tone, in a few sentences with examples of how you write.
6. Applications: examples on shirts, buttons, the website, and the pit.

Learn from published examples

Several top teams publish their guides or design assets, and those work well as templates. Team 254 (The Cheesy Poofs) publishes brand and identity assets with exact color values. Team 1868 (Space Cookies), a NASA Ames-affiliated team, maintains professional standards. Plenty of other teams share guides as PDFs on Chief Delphi, so search the forum for “brand guidelines” or “style guide.”

Respecting the FIRST brand

FIRST maintains its own strict guidelines, downloadable from the official FIRST Brand & Assets page. The rules to know:

• FIRST provides official logos for FIRST, for FIRST Robotics Competition, and for each season. The 2026 challenge is REBUILT presented by Haas (sponsored by The Gene Haas Foundation), part of the multi-program FIRST AGE presented by Qualcomm season.
• The FIRST icon, meaning the triangle-circle-square symbol without the wordmark, may be used only when a full official logo appears elsewhere in the same material. The wordmark on its own follows the same rule.
• The season logo, the REBUILT lockup, has its own clear-space, sizing, and color rules in the FIRST AGE style guide. Don’t rotate it, recolor it, distort it, or add elements to it.
• Before you sell anything with FIRST marks on it, read FIRST’s “Policy on the Use of FIRST Trademarks and Copyrighted Materials.”

Keeping it alive

Store the guide where every member can find it, linked from your team wiki or Drive. Review and version it each preseason, and note the year on the cover. Onboard new members with a short “brand basics” session.

The guide is clear enough when a brand-new freshman could read it and make an on-brand Instagram post on day one.

Key takeaways

• A written brand guide protects your identity against yearly member turnover and signals sustainability to judges
• Include logo rules, exact colors, fonts, imagery style, voice, and real application examples
• Follow FIRST’s official trademark rules and the season (REBUILT / FIRST AGE) lockup guidelines when combining marks

This lesson was adapted from learnfrc.com.