Creating a Comprehensive Brand Style Guide any Why
“Looking like a real Sheik is the cat’s meow.”
A brand style guide is essential for maintaining consistency across all forms of communication and media. By clearly defining your brand’s visual and verbal elements, a style guide ensures that your brand is easily recognizable and trustworthy. This guide not only aids in designing marketing materials but also informs social media posts, ad campaigns, and internal communications.
This gives you consistency, ensuring uniformity in visual and verbal communications.
Solidifies, brand recognition, letting customers recognize your brand across various platforms.
Increases efficiency by streamlining the creative process for designers, copywriters, and developers.
Enhances the overall appearance of your brand, leading to a look of professionalism.
Finally builds trust with customers by presenting a cohesive and stable brand image.
What to Include in Your Style Guide
Define the Brand overall with some simple information. A brand style guide is meant to be an outline that informs and keeps people on the same page.
To start write down a:
Mission Statement – Articulate the company’s core values and what sets it apart from competitors.
Name and Tagline – Explain the significance of the company name and the essence of the tagline.
Voice and Tone – Describe the brand’s personality and how it communicates. For instance, is it formal or casual, humorous or serious?
Intended Audience – Identify the target audience with detailed buyer personas. This helps in tailoring the communication style to resonate with the audience.
Define your Visual Identity
Create your logo and secondary logo for other uses.
Heartless, for example, has a full logo, and some secondary designs.
Provide guidelines on how and where to use the full logo and secondary logo. Square formats, wide formats, define these use cases and define them.
Define the proportions and alignment that should be used and detail the exact measurements and placement rules for the logos.
Finally, include examples of acceptable and unacceptable logo treatments. This helps to keep silly mistakes from happening.
Color Palette
Define the color schemes and provide their hex codes, CMYK, and RGB values. Assign primary and secondary colors that can be used. These should give express purposes for each color, with accent colors, and use cases.
Typography
List the fonts to be used for headings, body text, and other elements. Google Fonts and other resources are available to help you find the right fonts to use for your visual style and ensure that your branding is consistent.
Beyond use cases for each font, detail the sizes, weights, and styles appropriate for different contexts.
Photography
Not all brands will use photography often, but having some guidelines for the use of photographs is helpful to inform content, especially social media. Define the photographic style, such as candid or posed, professional or casual and include images that reflect the brand’s visual identity.
Iconography
Specify the design and usage of icons, ensuring they are consistent with other visual elements. A cartoony magnifying glass icon can stick out when the rest of your branding utilizes photographs.
Writing Guidelines
Create a baseline guide for writing principles. Use an existing style guide (e.g., AP Style) as a base and add your brand-specific rules.
Formatting
Include details on the use of bullets, lists, hyphens, and quotes. Define fully the tone and voice to be used. Provide examples of the right and wrong tone and voice. Describe the desired sentence structure and word choice.
Additional Details
List words to avoid, engagement tips, and other relevant details.
Digital Presence
Social Media
Describe the voice and tone for social media posts, it should not differ much from your normal tone or voice. However, it is not uncommon for the tone on social media to be more casual.
Create content guidelines and provide examples and rules for different platforms if needed.
Website
Include SEO best practices to ensure content is optimized as it is being created and posted to the website.
Finally, ensure the website is accessible to all users, including those with disabilities.
Examples and Templates
Provide templates for common documents, presentations, and marketing materials. If you think that you are going to have to do something more than once, make a template.
You may want to include examples of successful brand communications to serve as inspiration.
Tools and Resources
There is a plethora of tools available, the most common come from Adobe or Canva, but there are other excellent
Design Tools
List recommended tools for creating brand assets, such as Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. Adobe Express, and Canva also have the ability to define aspects of your brand so that people stay on the same page with logos and marketing.
Resources
Include links to helpful resources, such as online courses or design communities. Download links to commonly used tools, or online services.
Wrapping Up
A comprehensive brand style guide is a cornerstone of effective brand management. By establishing clear guidelines for every aspect of your brand’s presentation, you ensure consistency, professionalism, and trust. Share your style guide with your entire team and any external partners to maintain a cohesive brand identity.
If you want help in creating your own brand style guide and integrating it into your own SEO plans, or Digital Marketing in general, contact us today and we’ll help you look sharp online.
