Writing a Brand Guidelines Document

Why you need a written guide

FRC teams lose a meaningful share of their members every year to graduation. Without a written brand guidelines document (also called a style guide or brand book), your carefully built identity drifts: someone uses the wrong blue, a rookie squishes the logo, slides start using Comic Sans. A guide is your defense against entropy and is something judges love to see because it proves sustainability - a core theme of the Impact Award.

What a good guide contains

1. Logo usage - the master logo, approved variations (horizontal, stacked, icon-only), minimum size, and required clear space (the empty margin around the logo). Show what NOT to do: don't stretch, recolor, add shadows, or place on busy backgrounds.
2. Color palette - swatches with HEX, RGB, CMYK, and Pantone values, and notes on which colors are primary vs. accent.
3. Typography - heading and body fonts, sizes, and fallbacks.
4. Imagery style - the look of your photos (bright, action-focused, etc.).
5. Voice and tone - a few sentences and examples describing 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; study them as templates:

• Team 254 (The Cheesy Poofs) publishes brand/identity assets with exact color values.
• Team 1868 (Space Cookies), a NASA Ames-affiliated team, maintains professional standards.
• Many teams share guides as PDFs on Chief Delphi - 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. Key rules to know:

• FIRST provides official logos for FIRST, FIRST Robotics Competition, and 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 (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 alone has 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, recolor, distort, or add elements to it.
• Read FIRST's "Policy on the Use of FIRST Trademarks and Copyrighted Materials" before selling anything with FIRST marks on it.

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; note the year on the cover.
• Onboard new members with a short "brand basics" session.

The goal is a document so clear that a brand-new freshman could make an on-brand Instagram post on day one.