What a brand book needs once AI makes the images

Those documents are not wrong. They are just incomplete in one specific place, and it happens to be the place that now does most of the work. Your logo is used in a handful of ways. Your product images are used thousands of times, by people who do not work for you.

This article is about that chapter. Not a full brand book template, which you can find anywhere, but the part that is usually missing, and what to put in it when your visuals are produced at volume.

Why the image chapter is the one that is missing

The logo section is precise because it was written by somebody who had to defend the logo. Clear space is a number. Minimum size is a number. Nobody writes "use the logo warmly".

The photography section is usually written as inspiration, because at the time it was made, images were produced a few at a time by people with taste. It did not need to be precise, so it was not.

That assumption held until production stopped being the bottleneck. Once a range of a thousand can realistically have six images each, the photography section has to carry the same weight the logo section always did.

An example structure for the image chapter

This is the structure we would use. Eight sections, each with at least one approved reference image, because a reference image is worth more than a paragraph.

1. What our images are for. Two or three sentences on what a buyer should understand from an image of your product. This is the only section allowed to be qualitative, and it exists so the rest has a reason.

2. The fixed core. The decisions that make your product recognisable anywhere, even after a hostile crop: background treatment, light direction, standard angle, colour rendering. Keep this to five or six items. Each one gets a number or a reference, not an adjective.

3. The image set per product. What "complete" means. We use a minimum of six: packshot, second angle, detail, in-context, scale cue, and channel crops. Yours may differ; the point is that it is written once and is the same every time. We described our own version in the minimum set per product.

4. Material notes per product family. What correct looks like for metal, glass, fabric, wood, transparent plastic, fine patterns. What the common failure is, with an example of each. This page saves more review cycles than any other.

5. Context rules. When a product appears in a scene: which rooms, which styling level, which props are allowed, what must never be in frame. Include the market variants, because a German, Danish and Dutch interior are not interchangeable and a local dealer notices immediately.

6. Negative rules. What must never appear. Competing products, unrelated brand names, recognisable faces, colours you do not sell, seasons that contradict the launch. This section catches plausible mistakes, and plausible mistakes are the ones that get published.

7. Formats and naming. Aspect ratios, resolutions and file naming, per channel and per partner type. Naming matters more than it sounds: the people downstream search on exactly that, and an unfindable file is an unused file.

8. Who decides. The owner of the chapter, how an exception is requested, and the rule that every granted exception is added here. This is the section that keeps the document from going stale, and it is the one that is almost never present.

The extract your partners actually get

Here is the part that does not exist in most brand books at all, and it is the one that matters most if you sell through others.

Your dealers and retailers will never read a forty-page document. What they need is a one-page extract: which images they may use, what they may and may not do with them, how to credit you if that applies, and where to get the current version. Put that extract where the images are, not in an email somebody archived in 2024.

Two practical rules we would add to it:

• •Say explicitly which images may be cropped and which may not.
• •Say what to do when a partner needs something you have not supplied. Without that line, they improvise, and the improvisation becomes their standard for your brand.

This is the difference between a brand book that documents your identity and one that defends it on pages you do not control.

Format: not a PDF

A sixty-page PDF is a snapshot of what was true on the day it was exported. The moment the first exception is granted, it is wrong, and nobody knows which version they have.

Three things help more than design quality:

Keep it where the images are. Rules next to assets get followed. Rules in a separate system get looked up once.

Version it visibly. A date and an owner on every page.

Make the reference images the document. The written rules explain the references; the references are the thing people actually compare against.

If your brand book is a PDF today, do not rewrite it. Pull the image chapter out, put it where the assets live, and let the PDF keep doing the logo.

How long this should take

Shorter than you think, if you resist the urge to make it beautiful first. The fixed core is an afternoon. The image set per product is a conversation. The material notes come out of your last six months of rejections, which is also the fastest way to write them: go through what you sent back and why.

The parts that take real time are the reference images and the decision about who owns it. Both are worth the time. Neither is a design exercise.

Where LensLab fits

We capture these rules as a Brand DNA per client, so production works from them rather than from a document somebody has to remember to open. Our creators produce the visuals with AI, a person from our team checks them before delivery, and everything lands in one central library that your dealers and retailers can be given access to through the distribution module.

Being straight about what is not there yet: a Brand Book Builder is coming, which will let you build and maintain this chapter in the platform itself. It is not available today. Until it is, we set it up together at the start.

More on how the rules themselves should be written in guidelines that survive production at volume. You can also see how we work.

In closing

A brand book earns its keep in the chapter nobody finishes. Write the image chapter as if the person reading it has never met you, give every rule a reference image, add the one-page extract for partners, and put a name on who decides.

Want help turning your current guidelines into something a production process can follow? Try LensLab free with five credits.