Color palettes are crucial to ensuring visual consistency across platforms.  It isn’t just about picking colors, but also making sure that printed media (CMYK) matches digital media (RGB). These different color formats can create huge discrepancies in the visual appeal of your color selections.  This is crucial to maintaining the integrity of your brand. As you can see in the below image, the bright vibrant orange you see on your computer screen is not the same orange that can be printed on a piece of paper. That is because the RGB color spectrum is much larger than that of CMYK, and some RGB colors cannot be reproduced using CMYK.

Choosing the right combination of fonts can create harmony between the colors and messaging. Fonts can build recognition of your brand- just like Coca Cola is synonymous with those famously curly red letters.  In the example picture, you can see how much a font can invoke a specific emotion.  That being said, which note would you rather find on your kitchen counter?

Branding is also how you present yourself in documents, business cards, reports, emails, etc.  A proper brand guideline will include templates for every kind of document imaginable- so that anyone in the company, from the shippers to the CEO- can write a document and it will be 100% consistent with how you want to be presented.