Your First Brand Kit: A Startup Checklist From Logo to Launch

Most brand kit advice hands you twenty items in a flat list and calls it a checklist. That's not sequencing. It's a flat inventory. A founder with three weeks until launch doesn't need to know everything a brand kit can eventually include. They need to know what breaks the site tomorrow if it's missing, versus what can wait until someone asks for it. What's actually inside a brand kit covers the full list and the general now-versus-later split. This is the startup-specific version: tied to the three moments that actually happen before a product ships, not to a generic priority order.

Before you write a line of code or open a store

Everything downstream is cut from your logo file, so get that right first.

Get the logo as an SVG. It redraws cleanly at any size, which matters the moment you need it in a website header, a favicon, and an app icon, all at different pixel dimensions from one source. PNG vs SVG explains why this decision is hard to undo later, and the gap usually shows up first as a blurry favicon nobody notices until launch week.

Pull a one-color, icon-only version out of that file too. You'll need it for a favicon, a social profile photo, and anything printed cheaply, and none of those want your full horizontal wordmark squeezed into a small square. Lockup terms like horizontal, stacked, and mono are worth five minutes if those words don't mean anything yet, because you'll be asking a developer or a template for one of them by name soon.

Last, write down your hex codes. Building a five-color palette from your logo walks through picking the set and giving each color a job. Skip that step and "the blue from the logo" turns into three slightly different blues across your site, your deck, and your Stripe checkout page.

Before your first public post

Once you're about to tell anyone this exists, either founders or early users, two things need to exist.

A square profile image. Most platforms crop it to a circle, so a wordmark gets clipped at the edges and only the icon mark survives. The social sizing guide has the current pixel dimensions per platform; the short version is to upload larger than the display size and keep 10-15% padding around the mark so the crop doesn't eat it.

An email signature. If you're emailing early users, investors, or a waitlist, the signature is doing more brand work than most founders give it credit for. Setting one up in Gmail and Outlook covers both platforms. The detail that trips people up: a wide horizontal lockup looks cramped at signature height, so use the icon mark instead.

Two fonts, one for headings and one for body text, round this stage out. Font choice for non-designers is the fast version of that decision. You don't need this locked before your first tweet, but you do need it before your landing page copy goes up, or every update reads in a slightly different typeface.

Before launch day

This is the stage people underrate, because none of it is visible until it's missing.

The favicon has to be in the browser tab, showing your icon mark instead of the generic gray globe. Turning a logo into a favicon covers the sizing and why it's cut from the icon mark rather than the full wordmark.

A link-preview image matters the first time someone drops your URL in Slack or a group chat. Without one, the link previews as a blank gray card, which reads as "nobody finished this yet" even if the product is solid. Building an OG image from your logo covers the standard 1200x630 size and the safe area so nothing important gets cropped.

If someone besides you is building the site, hand off the kit as a folder of files: the SVG and PNG logo, the favicon set, hex codes, font names, and the icon-only mark. Handing a brand kit off to a designer or developer covers what belongs in it, so you're not fielding "what font do you use" questions the night before launch.

The whole sequence at a glance

Nothing on this list is print collateral, a mascot, or a forty-page guidelines document, and that's deliberate. A pre-revenue startup with one founder doesn't need rules for a brand only that founder touches. Guidelines earn their place once a second person starts making decisions about how the thing looks, which for most startups is well after launch.

If you're building something more specific

If you're shipping a SaaS product specifically, the launch-day list gets a little more technical: app icon sizes if there's a mobile app, and a tighter OG-image and meta-tag setup since your growth loop probably runs through shared links. Brand kit for SaaS founders covers that version in more depth. Selling through a marketplace instead of your own site shifts the list again, toward listing photos and a shop icon rather than a website header; brand kit for Etsy sellers covers that case.

Where Brandize fits

If you don't have a logo yet, that's the one blocking decision, since everything above gets cut from it. Brandize generates the logo with the SVG, PNG, and a commercial license, and the one-time Brand Starter and Brand Kit tiers cover the favicon, palette, and social sizes above without turning it into a subscription. If you already have a logo and vector file, most of this is an afternoon of export work: pull the variants, write down the hex codes, and build the favicon and OG image now, while there's still slack in the schedule.