Understanding Guides
Guides are where you organize your brand guidelines.
Each Guide covers a different part of your brand, such as how your brand communicates, looks, moves, or is applied. Every Brand Workspace starts with five Guides.
Understand the all five Guides
The five system Guides always appear in this order.
Guide | What it covers |
|---|---|
Identity | Your brand essence, purpose, values, positioning, and personality |
Verbal | Your voice, tone, audiences, and writing examples |
Visual | Your logos, colors, typography, imagery, and other visual rules |
Motion | How your brand moves, including principles, timings, and safety rules |
Application | Examples of your brand in use, such as posters, social posts, and presentations |
Know what you can change
The Identity, Verbal, Visual, and Motion Guides have a fixed structure.
The system pages inside these Guides cannot be deleted, moved, or renamed.
This gives your brand context a consistent structure. Sameness, your exports, and connected AI tools can understand what each part of your brand means and where to find it.
You can still:
Write and edit the content on system pages
Add Blocks to pages where they are supported
Add your own sections and pages
Disable system pages that do not apply to your brand
The Application Guide is different. Its pages are fully flexible, so you can add, rename, reorder, or delete them. We highly recommend to use the block application inside application guide.
Disable pages you don’t need
Not every brand needs every system page.
For example, your brand might not use gradients or have motion safety rules. Instead of leaving these pages empty, open the ••• menu and disable the page.
When you disable a system page:
It is hidden from your published brand portal.
Its structured data is removed from your JSON exports.
You can enable it again later if you need it.
This lets you keep the structure of Sameness without filling your brand context with sections that do not apply to your brand.
Build your Guides in order
We recommend working through the system Guides in this order:
Identity
Verbal
Visual
Motion
Application
Start with Identity because it defines what your brand is and what it stands for. Then move into how the brand speaks, how it looks, how it moves, and finally how those parts come together in real work.
You do not need to complete every Guide before moving to the next one. Build the parts that apply to your brand and return to them as your brand develops.
Hide a Guide until it’s ready
You can hide an entire Guide from your published brand portal.
The Guide stays inside your editor, but visitors will not see it. Use this when a whole Guide is not ready to share. For example, you might hide your Motion Guide while your motion system is still being developed.
The Identity, Verbal, Visual, and Motion Guides can be hidden, but they cannot be deleted.
Protect a Guide with a password
You can also protect a Guide with a password. Visitors can see that the Guide exists, but they need the password to open it.
This is useful for brand content that is ready but should only be seen by certain people, such as an unreleased campaign or upcoming brand refresh.
Option | Use it when |
|---|---|
Hide | The Guide is not ready to be seen |
Private | The Guide is ready but should stay private |
Create your own Guides
You can create additional Guides for anything that does not fit inside the five system Guides.
For example, you could create:
A campaign playbook
A partner Guide
An employer brand Guide
A product brand Guide
Guides you create yourself are fully flexible.
You can create your own sections and pages, rename them, reorder them, or delete them whenever you need to.