How To Create A Style Guide For Your Brand

Most companies use a style guide, a blueprint of what marketing materials should look like, both online and offline.

This blueprint is a set of rules that instruct employees and service providers on how to present the brand to the public. The rules include official logo use, colours and fonts the brand will use.

An effective brand is clear and consistent, hence every brand needs this outline.

Establishing a consistent brand boosts your company’s brand recognition, reputation, and trustworthiness, so creating and following a brand style guide to stay on track is worth the time and effort. Here’s everything you need to know on the basic elements of a style guide.

 Logo

 When designing a logo, less is always more. The colours used on a logo should not be more than 3 and should apply to any material the brand produces. An effective logo should be versatile, meaning it should be able to work across a variety of mediums and applications. Ask yourself if your logo will still be effective if printed in black and white, one colour or printed on something small or large. To create a versatile logo, you should first design it in black and white.

 A Style Guide Should Include Fonts To Be Used

Every brand should have its own fonts and these should be consistent, meaning they should be used in all of their marketing materials, online and off. You may also want to specify sizes for things like headings or photo captions in different applications.

 Colours Should Be Specified In The Style Guide

Your logo colours should be used in your website design, social media profiles and on all your brand materials. You should know that not every colour can be perfectly transferred between web and print use, so it’s a good idea include the RGB, CMYK, and hex colour code for each colour so that your colours look the same on screen and when printed.

Copywriting  Style

It is a good idea to have your brand presenting a certain tone in written communication. This is termed your brand voice. In this section you can also cover things like the way you use your brand name, pay off line, product or service names and events.

  Image Usage

Your brand’s overall use of imagery should be cohesive. Provide guidelines for the tone and feel of images to be used. For example friendly, warm, or simple images or you might specify that every photo used needs to include a specific colour, needs to have a certain filter applied or should be in black and white.

Do yourself a favour and create a basic brand style guide to keep everything on track. You’ll be glad you did, and we would be happy to help if you give us a shout.

Contact Victoria Smith