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,corporate 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, in this way 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 more. The colours used on a logo should not be more than three and should apply to any material the brand produces. An effective logo should be versatile, 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, in one colour or printed on something either small or large. To create a versatile logo, you should first design it in black and white. A logo should also communicate the type of services you provide and should stand the test of time as well as be easy to remember.

Fonts To Be Used

Every brand should have its own fonts that are easy to read and these should be consistent, they should be used in all of the marketing materials both online and offline. You may also want to specify sizes for headings or image captions in different applications. The font family normally has different types style, that is regular, bold, italic and similar. This can be used instead of introducing another font.

Colour Specification

The logo colours should be used on the website design, social media profiles and on all brand materials. You should know that not every colour can be perfectly transferred between web and print usage, therefore it’s a good to include RGB for digital, CMYK for print, and hex colour [webs] code for each colour so that the colours look the same on screen and when printed.

Copywriting Style

It is also good 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 such as the way you use your brand name, pay off line, product or service names and events.

Image Usage

The 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 image used needs to include a specific colour, needs to have a certain filter applied or should be in black and white.

Do yourself a favor 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