Creating Brand Style Guidelines is paramount in today’s competitive market to ensure consistency, cohesiveness, and recognition. These guidelines serve as the blueprint for your brand’s visual and tonal identity, guiding every aspect of your communication. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll delve into the intricacies of developing Brand Style Guidelines that resonate with your audience, foster brand loyalty, and elevate your brand’s presence.
What is a Brand Style Guidelines?
A Brand Style Guide is simply your brand identity document, presented in a format that makes it easy to apply that identity to any content you create. From your logo to your brand voice, it’s a toolkit that helps you present a consistent, cohesive brand to the world.
A Brand Style Guidelines is a rulebook that specifies everything that plays a role in the look and feel of your brand – everything from typography to logos and images.
It also allows everyone to know exactly how to present their brand to the world. It guides the design for all your content, from blog posts and presentations to stationery and business cards.
A ton of the world’s tech companies have rebranded over the past few years, and some have devoted serious time and effort to creating full brand style guides.
Why Do You Need A Brand Style Guide?
Everything you create should accurately represent your brand. But the bigger your network, the harder it can be to monitor content and make sure everything is consistent. (Sometimes it’s not even the freelancer’s fault; in-house teams can be a bit too loose, too.)
This is why a brand style guide is so important. Not only does it provide consistency but it benefits your brand in several ways.
- Other Quality Control: Not everyone has an art director to oversee every project, and often you’re up against a deadline. This, and many other variables can result in content that is fragmented and ineffective. Your reputation depends on the quality of your creative content, so having good authoritative guides ensures that you’re always publishing content you’re proud of.
- Increased Awareness: Clear communication and good design make life easier for your reader or viewer. Guidelines for things like data visualization, color usage, or typography help creators design more effective content, creating a better overall content experience. Also, this simple act is a great service to the people you want to connect with. It shows that you value their time and help them get the information they need and want.
- Best brand recognition: Brand guidelines help you deliver a cohesive brand experience, making it easier for people to identify your valuable content. When you provide consistent, high-quality content, people come to rely on you and—even better—search for your content. They trust that you will always deliver what they want, and that trust is the foundation of any strong relationship.
What Should A Brand Style Guidelines Include?
Your goal is to create a practical style guide that empowers brand creators to create differentiated brand content. While style guides are often thought of as just a design, you want a document that helps people understand how your brand looks and speaks. What does it look like?
A brand style guide, also known as a brand guidelines document, should include comprehensive instructions and standards for maintaining consistency in visual and written communication across all channels. Here’s a breakdown of what it should typically include:
- Brand Overview:
- Mission, vision, and values of the brand.
- Brief history or background information about the brand.
- Logo Usage:
- Correct and incorrect usage examples.
- Clear space requirements around the logo.
- Approved color variations (if any).
- Typography:
- Primary and secondary typefaces with examples.
- Usage guidelines for headings, subheadings, body text, etc.
- Font sizes and spacing guidelines.
- Colour Palette:
- Primary brand colours with corresponding HEX or RGB codes.
- Secondary colours or accent colours if applicable.
- Colour usage rules, such as for backgrounds, text, and accents.
- Imagery:
- Guidelines for photography styles (if applicable).
- Types of imagery that align with the brand’s aesthetic.
- Examples of approved and unapproved imagery.
- Iconography:
- Standard icons used in branding and their applications.
- Guidelines for creating new icons consistent with the brand style.
- Graphic Elements:
- Borders, patterns, or textures are used in branding.
- Instructions on how to use and apply graphic elements.
- Layout and Design:
- Grid systems or layout templates for consistency.
- Rules for margins, padding, and alignment.
- Voice and Tone:
- Guidelines for written communication style.
- Examples of tone for different contexts (e.g., formal, casual).
- Usage Examples:
- Mockups of various branded materials (e.g., business cards, letterheads, social media posts) showing correct usage.
- Digital Guidelines:
- Specifications for digital assets like website banners, email templates, etc.
- Guidelines for social media branding, including profile picture sizes, cover photos, etc.
- Print Guidelines:
- Specifications for print materials like brochures, flyers, posters, etc.
- Instructions for print production, including colour profiles and file formats.
- Accessibility Guidelines:
- Recommendations for ensuring accessibility in design and content.
- Version Control:
- Information on the document version and updates.
- Contact Information:
- Details of who to contact for questions or clarifications regarding brand usage.
A comprehensive brand style guide serves as a crucial reference for anyone involved in creating content or materials representing the brand, ensuring consistency and coherence in its visual and written identity.
What Makes A Brand Style Guidelines?
An incomplete Brand Style Guidelines is as effective as no style guide at all. If you want yours to be as useful as possible, it should be:
- Comprehensive: Again, your style guide should help everyone create on-brand content, so make sure you’ve included as much relevant information as possible.
- Practice: You want your style guide to be comprehensive, but you don’t need to overwhelm people with information. (This will make it difficult, and your team will probably avoid using it.) Provide clear instructions with simple, concise language, and helpful examples.
- Accessible: Everyone on your team should know where to find your style guide.
Most importantly, your style guide should be customized to your brand’s specific needs—whatever they may be.
Why Are Brand Style Guidelines Important?
You want customers to recognize your brand no matter where they see it – on their phone, TV or billboard. The best brands use common visual elements and styles to increase brand recognition. A brand style guide is an essential tool to ensure your company produces consistent, cohesive work—especially if you’re working with creative partners like freelancers or marketing agencies.
Your creative team will disappear, you will lose brand consistency, and you will limit your overall credibility. Brand direction enables companies to grow (the right way) by giving them the option to outsource creative, be it to other internal teams such as Sales ability Marketing, and HR, or to external groups such as freelancers and agencies.
Brand guidelines set the standard of quality for your brand and everyone who uses it. And, when everything is relevant Strategic Brand Management.
In one organized, packaged document, your team can streamline design workflows, improve design collaboration, and deliver more incredible content, faster.
Remove creative barriers, and get everyone on the same page with live design collaboration.
Explain Visual Identity.
The first impression of a brand is often visual, so it is important to code the details of these graphic design elements. A brand style guide should have rules about how and when creatives can use assetsBrand kit.
1. The logo
Your logo It may seem like a simple aspect of your branding guidelines, but it’s one of the most complex and important parts.
In your Brand Style Guidelines, you should include a preview of your logo, explain the design details, and explain how it can be used by external and internal publishers (with or without your brand symbol, for example, or with specific spacing requirements).
Specify full logo – Logo image attached to the company name – to be used where space permits. Provide a secondary logo for use in situations when a full one is unnecessary or inappropriate. Be specific about the proportions and layout of these design and text elements, down to the pixel, so the brand presents a consistent face to the world.
You might also include a list of design dos and don’ts and specify which logo treatments should be avoided because they don’t fit with the brand identity. A tool like Adobe Illustrator is the best choice for creating logos.
2. Color Sheet
The Color palette is Perhaps one of the most specific and recognizable parts of a company’s branding guidelines. This is the group of colours that your company uses Design these brand assets, directing each piece of visual content to be created. These colour combinations often follow HEX or RGB colour codes and govern your logo, web design, print ads, and event collateral.
to establish Primary and secondary colours. Specify a hex code for each colour, so whether designers use CMYK colour codes for brand printed materials or RGB for web pages, they can reproduce the exact shade every time.
3. Typography
Typography Your Brand Style Guidelines is a visual element that goes beyond the font you use in your company logo. It supports your brand design by downlinks and copy on your website – even your tagline. We recommend specifying primary and secondary fonts with a mix of serifs and font weights for different use cases.
Remember, the goal of your branding strategy is to empower your people and external stakeholders to create a consistent but differentiated message on behalf of your brand. You don’t want to limit them to a single font option.
Note two or three types of faces the brand uses. Describe the use case for each font as well as the desired size, spacing, and weight. Whatever font family represents the brand, designers must use it consistently. Be sure to include web styles, so developers know how to create uniform pages.
4. Photography
You can just include your logo, colours, and fonts in your guidelines, but if you want to create strong Brand Style Guidelines, consider including approved images, pre-designed icons, and custom symbols for your company. Do your website and print collateral.
If your budget is small, you can suggest image styles (eg staged, etc.), and then direct content creators to your preferred stock image provider (eg Shutterstock, Unsplash). Alternatively, you can do a company photo shoot in a studio and prepare the resulting photos for creative use.
Define the brand’s photography style.
Is it a pose or a pose? Professional or casual? Is that the purple-haired young woman at the music festival? An old couple walking on the beach? Refer to your customers’ personas to define the types of photos that will appeal to each.
5. Iconography
In Brand Style Guidelines From social media icons to mobile app buttons, details matter. Graphics should be easy to understand and consistent with other design elements of the brand. Icons should work with logos and typography to create a unified look across all communications.
Examples Of Brand Identity Guides
1) Zendesk
A strong brand identity can tell a strong story, and Zendesk does this very well. Their style guide feels less prescriptive and more editorial, as they break down elements of their brand identity, including simple dos and don’ts, tips, and resources to make it easy to implement.
2) Gusto
Not every brand needs to design a clean interface. A well-designed PDF can be just as useful, as Gusto proves. Their brand guidelines stand out because of their simplicity and effectiveness. Not only do they provide practical tips but they educate the user on why these tips are so important and how they communicate the brand’s philosophy.
3). Medium
Medium’s simple brand style guide emphasizes the use of its logos, wordmarks, and symbols. The medium logo is and was the primary graphic element of the brand building up a Feeling of “assured, premium, timeless and modern”.
4). Walmart
Walmart is one of the world’s largest and most recognizable brands, so it’s no surprise that its brand guide is so comprehensive.
The guide includes the brand logo, photography, typography, photography, graphics, voice, editorial style, and more. Walmart’s colour palette is so perfect for its brand identity that its main colour is called “Walmart Blue”.
5). Spotify
Spotify’s style guide may seem simple and green, but there’s more to the brand than just a lime green ring. Spotify’s colour palette includes three colour codes, while the rest of the company’s branding guidelines focus heavily on logo variations and album artwork.
The style guide even allows you to download an image version of this logo, making it easy to represent the company without manually recreating it.
Marking instructions
If you want to take your Brand Style Guidelines to the next level, I recommend following these best practices, which the HubSpot creative team used to disseminate branding information to the rest of the HubSpot marketing team.
Not only has this made my job as a blogger easier, but our branding feels well thought out and cohesive.
1. Make Your Guides A Branded Document.
Whether you’re publishing your branding guidelines online or creating an internal presentation, consider making the guidelines themselves a branded document. Make sure the published document follows your established brand voice, uses symbols and images you’ve created, and uses colours and typography that make your brand feel like you.
When our creative team updated the visual identity for the HubSpot brand, we all got access to a branded playbook that summarized all the changes and explained how we should represent HubSpot online moving forward. Not only was I a big fan of the refresh, but also of the way it was presented to our team in a targeted document.
You can do this, regardless of your budget. Our creative team used a free tool, Google Slides – So it’s perfectly usable for a small or independent brand!
2. Name your brand colours.
You’ve already chosen your colour palette – why bother naming the colours? Giving your colours unique names (other than “blue” or “orange”) can help you tie tactical elements of your branding into a general theme or ethos.
Not to mention it’s great to be able to refer to company colors by a specific name. Imagine if we called Solaris, HubSpot’s primary brand colour, “HubSpot Orange” — it simply doesn’t have the same ring.
In updating our visual identity, In Brand Style Guidelines our creative team clarified and sharpened our colour palette, then renamed individual colours. They wrote, “Each colour, hue, and shade is based on central themes. […] Whether it’s a subway line in Paris, or a flower-lined street in Japan, secondary colour names are all over the world.” A veritable tour of important cultural and geographic touchstones from HubSpotters.
Think about what makes your brand unique, and why you chose the colours you did. For example, if you work at a law firm that specializes in car accident cases, you might choose red as one of your brand colours and call it a “stop light.”
3. Create Easy-To-Use Branded Templates.
Along with your Brand Style Guidelines should be templates to empower your team to easily design branded assets, even if they are not designers. At HubSpot, we store all of our templates in our team’s Canva account. There, anyone (including me) can modify pre-built designs for many use cases.
As a writer on the HubSpot blog, I have to create graphics to complement the information I share. The branded templates created by our creative team made my job so much easier – and I can imagine it’s the same for our social media team when they need to publish an update to one of HubSpot’s social media profiles.
Whether you run a small or large business, you can benefit from creating at least one template that can be adjusted to different sizes. Not everyone is a designer, but with templates, you can make sure your brand looks professional without having to fork out a fortune.
4. Make Sure Your Branding Is Optimized For All Channels.
Your branding guidelines should include different specifications for different channels – or you should have assets and designs that can be adjusted for different channels and mediums. Not only for measurement purposes but also for accessibility purposes.
For example, if you primarily market your brand on Instagram and your website, your logo should have web-friendly colours, as well as an Instagram-friendly design and size. On Instagram, you might want to avoid small, light typography, so your font should work well for that channel as well.
You don’t want to change your branding significantly from channel to channel; This should work relatively well unless you are marketing your brand.
Conclusion
In conclusion, developing comprehensive Brand Style Guidelines is essential for businesses navigating today’s competitive market landscape. These guidelines serve as the foundation for maintaining consistency, cohesiveness, and recognition across all communication channels. By providing clear instructions and standards for visual and tonal identity, brand style guides empower creators to represent the brand accurately and effectively.
The importance of Brand Style Guidelines lies in their ability to ensure consistency and coherence, benefiting brands in various ways. Firstly, they serve as a form of quality control, ensuring that all content reflects the brand’s standards and values, even in the absence of direct oversight. Secondly, brand style guides enhance awareness and user experience by facilitating clear communication and good design practices. When content is consistently delivered in line with brand guidelines, it fosters trust and loyalty among consumers, ultimately leading to increased brand recognition and preference.
A well-crafted Brand Style Guidelines should encompass key elements such as logo usage, typography, colour palette, imagery, iconography, graphic elements, layout and design, voice and tone, and usage examples. By providing detailed instructions and examples, these guidelines equip both internal and external stakeholders with the necessary tools to create cohesive and differentiated brand content.
Furthermore, implementing best practices such as branding the guidelines document, naming brand colours, creating easy-to-use templates, and optimizing branding for various channels can further enhance the effectiveness of Brand Style Guidelines.
Ultimately, brand guidelines set the standard of quality for the brand and everyone associated with it. They enable consistency, improve collaboration, and enhance brand credibility. In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, a comprehensive brand style guide is not just a valuable asset but a strategic imperative for any business aiming to build a strong and enduring brand presence.
