A brand style guide is a manual that specifies how an organisation should represent itself to the public and customers. A style guide includes the use of its brand logo, font and colour choices, photography, the general mood, and other elements. In other words, it serves as a guide when designing a brand and promotes consistency in the way a brand appears, feels, and sounds. It's so potent that some even refer to it as a brand bible.
As a brand has a number of departments looking after different things, a brand book makes it easy to stick to the brand's style. When there is a brand book, you can be sure that your brand will always look and feel the same, regardless of who handles customer service, marketing, design, and sales.
Importance Of A Brand Style Guide
A style guide sets the tone of the brand and how the brand wants to be perceived by its consumers. Consider your brand identity to be the personality of your business. It's how people start to recognise and trust you. If someone's appearance and behaviour continuously change, you won't feel like you know them and question their credibility.
Therefore, a style guide is crucial because it makes it easier for your company to communicate consistently among all teams and channels.
A brand style guide's principal objective is to be distributed to others. By designing a brand style guide, you can guarantee that your brand's image will remain constant even when handled by third parties.
Designing A Brand Style Guide
Every brand style guide needs six components. You should discuss those elements as your top priorities with your brand designer. You can always revisit your brand style guide when you want to revamp your brand design. You may transform those emotions, sentiments, and visuals into actual brand pieces with the aid of a designer.
Listed below are the 6 elements you must keep in mind when designing a brand style guide:
Brand story
Whenever creating a brand style guide, start with the brand story. It provides the framework for the brand experience and should guide the remaining sections of the style guide. A brand story identifies and explains the most important values to an organisation. It conveys a company's ideals to the general public and can aid in important organisational decision-making.
Designing A Brand Logo
Having a defined brand style guide aids in choosing patterns, colours, textures, and typefaces that will convey the best message about your company. The most crucial component of your brand is your logo. It's the one thing that everyone should be able to identify as being uniquely yours.
This part of your brand style guide ensures your logo is utilised as you intended. Furthermore, it eliminates errors that might convey incorrect information, such as stretching, changing, condensing, or re-aligning.
Include all of your brand logo's authorised iterations, specify when to utilise each one, and include illustrations to help illustrate your point.
Size: Specify the minimum size and appropriate dimensions
Space: Clear instructions should be provided if a brand logo needs a specific quantity of white space around it
Colours: Demonstrate several renderings (inverted, coloured, black and white) and when to utilise each
Don'ts: Making it clear how you do not want your brand to be used might be as significant
Have A Defined Colour Palette
You need a brand palette that will help to provide a unified appearance and feel. Most firms stick very close to the colours of their logo by using four or fewer primary colours. Choose one light colour for backdrops, one deeper colour for writing, one neutral colour, and one stand-out colour.
Display samples of your brand's colours in your style guide. Wherever your brand statement appears, give the details required to duplicate those colours correctly.
Typography And Fonts
Font selection is a significant aspect of identity design as well. Whether you wish to specify numerous brand typefaces or whether one typeface family will be sufficient for all of your demands will depend on your brand's needs. Use a different typeface from the one in your logo as a general guideline since the contrast will make it stand out.
No matter how basic or intricate, your font scheme is, make sure it is utilised correctly by outlining your decision and providing detailed usage instructions.
Give a brief introduction of the fonts you are utilising, their relationship to your brand, and the purposes for which they are employed (headlines, body text, captions, etc.).
Alignment: Make it explicit if you want the copy to always be aligned to the right, left, or centre
Spacing: Provide tracking and kerning ratios to ensure a consistent look when the font size changes
Pictures And Images
When it's your organisation, you instinctively know which images and graphics fit your brand. Your brand style guide's imagery section will guide others in the right direction without burdening you with additional approval tasks.
Show samples of photos that have worked effectively for your brand as a best practice. Whether it's a print catalogue or an Instagram account, ensure you include the primary communication channels used by your business. If you can't locate all the examples for your business, go to more prominent companies for what seems correct. This will still offer your team an idea of the style to adhere to, and aiming high never hurts! Create a mood board by gathering photographs that reflect the impression you want customers to have of your business.
Set The Tone Of Your Brand
Though writing style may not immediately come to mind when considering brand identification, brand voice significantly impacts how your audience perceives you.
You may get in touch with Mellow Designs if you're searching for a branding agency or want to enhance the user experience on your website. At Mellow Designs, we develop brand imagery that connects with your target demographic and will help your company stand out in the online marketplace. Visit our existing blog content collection and subscribe for more educational blogs like this one.
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