How Much Time and Money Does a Brand Guidelines Generator Save Designers?

The real time and money a brand guidelines generator can save you.

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As designers, we love the creative phase, designing the logo, picking the palette, and crafting the visual language. But we often dread the delivery phase; building the brand guidelines document.

It’s an essential deliverable, but it’s often 90% administrative data entry and only 10% design. You find yourself acting as a copy-paster rather than a creative director.

I wanted to understand the real cost of this process, so I looked at data from a survey of 477 designers. 

In this post, I’m going to break down exactly how much time and money the manual approach is costing you, and why automation is the only way to scale.

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The Real Cost of The Manual Way

According to the survey, the vast majority of designers take anywhere from 1 to 5 days to complete a comprehensive brand guideline document. Very few can finish a professional deck in under 4 hours manually.

Let’s do the math on that.

If you charge an hourly rate of $100, and you spend just one full day (8 hours) building guidelines, that document costs you $800 in billable time.

If you charge a flat fee for the project, that is $800 of pure profit eaten up by administrative tasks. If you do this for just one client a month, you are losing nearly $10,000 a year to copy-and-paste work.

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The Time Thieves in Your Workflow

Where does all that time go? It’s not the design; it’s the tedious repetition.

• Manual Resizing: Placing the primary logo, secondary logo, and icons on different artboards and ensuring they are all aligned.
• Data Entry: Typing out font names, hierarchy rules, and manually copying HEX, RGB, and CMYK values (and multiple-checking for typos).
• The Revision Nightmare: This is the biggest thief. If a client changes one primary color halfway through, you have to manually find and update that swatch across 30+ pages.

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The Solution: Brand Guidelines Generators

Automation changes this equation entirely. Instead of designing the document page by page, a generator takes your inputs and builds the structure for you.

I recently explored the 5 top brand guidelines generators currently on the market. These tools promise to turn that multi-day task into a process that takes minutes, potentially reclaiming 98% of your time on this phase of the project.

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Why Web-Based Tools Fall Short

However, most existing generators have a major flaw: 

• They are web-based SaaS platforms.
• To use them, you have to break your workflow.
• You must export your assets from Illustrator, open a browser, and upload everything manually.
• They often require monthly subscriptions that cut into your margins, and they don't give you the vector precision you are used to.

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Enter Guideit™: The Illustrator-Native Solution

I realized designers needed a tool that works where they work. That’s why I built Guideit™, an Adobe Illustrator Plugin.

With Guideit™, there is no uploading or exporting. You simply select your logos on the artboard, input your brand assets, and generate a professional document instantly. 

You can read more about the story of why I created a brand guidelines generator plugin here.

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Generate Brand Guidelines in Seconds

Ready to save hours on your next project? You don't need to build layouts manually.

Create professional brand guidelines in seconds, not hours, with Guideit. It handles the structure, colors, and typography automatically inside Adobe Illustrator.

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Conclusion

Automation isn't about being lazy; it's about being profitable. By automating the low-value administrative work of building guidelines, you free up more time to focus on high-value creative solutions for your clients.

Stop wasting days on data entry. It’s time to let the tools do the work.