It’s used to communicate a company’s values to the public, and can also help guide major decision-making within an organization. Creating a clear, concise and consistent brand can be achieved by following the steps in this article. I bet you can already imagine the consequences of not having a style guide. and for your body text (all the other writing in your posts). Should they wish for an additional, more thorough version, this can be classed as a separate project – with a separate budget. After months of research and brainstorming, you’ve finally created the perfect brand strategy for your company. Here’s what you can learn from the brand style guides of my favorite brands (with some handy brand style guide templates sprinkled in) in this slick branding infographic: Before I dive into this guide, have you heard about Venngage’s Brand Kit feature? Brand style guides provide parameters for how anyone reproduces your brand’s name or image elsewhere. Depending on your business type and needs, you may have some different elements to consider for your own brand style guide, but here’s what we recommend including as a basic starting point for your brand guidelines: Fonts. has gone one better, removing any ambiguity about logo color by specifying primary, secondary, and incorrect logo color usage. The document provides everyone who works with your brand clarity on how to deliver a consistent experience across all media. Luckily for us, many of these brand style guides have been released publicly, so why not capitalize on all of their hard work? for your brand. Style guides can take a number of forms but they generally have key elements. Here’s how to create a solid brand style guide that keeps your business looking professional and consistent out there in the big world. To create an online space that makes your brand stand out from the rest. Create your brand’s style guide. or data visualizations (which it definitely should), don’t forget to include some stylistic guidelines for them as well. A brand style guide creates a set of standards based on all the things your church is doing well in communicating who you are. Your website is probably chock full of images within your blog posts, web copy, and more. All of the top brand style guides outline rules for exactly how to use their logos, to make sure nobody sends the wrong message with their brand. Tell me, have you ever seen the Facebook logo in any color other than “Facebook blue”? Use those samples to guide you as you craft your brand style guide. Remember: You might be sharing them with freelancers or a content agency . Before creating a Brand Style Guide, your designer needs to have created a set of visual brand elements. Let’s look at how to create one. That way, you’ll build the consistency you need to cultivate your brand’s image, connect with customers, and stand apart from the competition. Consistency is the first key of branding. Name your design style guide something like 'Styleguide_lite_v0.1' and explain to your client that this is the “lite” guide to working with the brand, which is suitable for everyday creative use. Once you’ve identified this content, take a closer look. Images. Even after you come up with your standard logo design, you’ll still need to figure out a few key factors for your brand style guide. Take inspiration from today’s top brands and make your own brand style guide to allow everyone representing your brand to produce collateral quickly, efficiently, and with confidence. Many companies are now using multiple color schemes to add vitality to their brand communications. If you’re just getting started defining your brand, we suggest looking through your existing content and setting aside the images, blog posts, and anything else you see that best aligns with your company’s brand. I haven’t, and that doesn’t happen by accident. for your brand. This includes its web design, tone, and content, the way you handle customer interactions, and more. Turn these ideas into a short and simple narrative that you can use to guide your brand’s logo creation, imagery and color palette, and personality overall. To avoid unnatural angles, never rotate the camera to an angle other than 90 degrees.”. Here’s an example of a branding infographic that showcases this: If your branding features infographics or data visualizations (which it definitely should), don’t forget to include some stylistic guidelines for them as well. Now, we’ve come to the fifth component of your brand style guide: Your choice of fonts and typography. What is a Brand Style Guide? , a well respected software company, has made their brand story all about personality. Take notes on the shared traits of your best performing images, and use that as a set of guidelines in your style guide. Connect with her on LinkedIn and on Twitter @MNediger. A great brand style guide also includes every acceptable color variation for a logo, making it tough to go wrong: Medium has gone one better, removing any ambiguity about logo color by specifying primary, secondary, and incorrect logo color usage. These six, core elements of a one-page brand style guide are more than sufficient to address how your brand is represented in the visual and written mediums. Venngage’s Brand Kit allows you to save your brand colors for easy access later. If you use Canva check out this Font Guide to build your brand. It will help you enhance your brand’s user experience and bring it to a whole new level. It doesn’t hurt to give some concrete examples, either. Choose words that best define you, and write using the language and tone that reflects these characteristics. Atlassian has gone the extra mile to come up with color combos that pass web accessibility standards, and given some handy examples of good and bad color contrast: On top of the social media graphic design trends of the moment, Spotify has even included realistic examples of where not to use their distinct “Spotify green”: Whichever way you shake it, the more examples the better when it comes to color in your brand style guide. brand style guide, the company mission is just spelled out, plain and simple: That includes specifications on how much space to leave around their logos, just like. Once completed, make sure guidelines are distributed to the team, stored in an easy-to-access place, and regularly updated. 07. Maybe you’ll make them laugh, or resolve their frustrations and fears. This lighthearted stance has helped them establish their voice after a recent and dramatic brand overhaul, and I, for one, am a big fan. They’ve made it clear that they know exactly who they are and what they want to be, describing themselves as “bold”, “optimistic”, and “practical with a wink”. Branding is about building up public perception, something that can only be achieved when you communicate a clear, unified message about who your company is. Ideally, it also helps them understand the choices you've made in creating your visual brand identity, and to understand why it's important to adhere to the Style Guide. You’ve designed a beautiful logo, figured out your brand’s color palette, and nailed your brand story. has left nothing to chance by including options for Android, wearables, Microsoft products, and even autos: Need to learn about choosing fonts? By giving tons of examples they make it impossible to go awry with messaging. The buttons and navigation bar should match your brand style, as well as a 404 page (fun 404 pages make light of an inconvenient situation). Build one with these 6 simple steps: Kick off your brand style guide with a great brand story; Use logo guidelines to create a recognizable brand signature To define your brand voice, come up with a handful of words that best describe your brand. Also, include your kerning (spacing between letters) and tracking ratios to keep your style consistent when your logo is resized. Every great brand is driven by a compelling brand story. When you’re starting your business, you spend a lot of time considering your brand. Shopify has gone above and beyond in defining their voice–including a ton of do’s and don’ts for grammar, punctuation, spelling, vocabulary, naming, and tone. Every company, big or small, needs a brand style guide to define and outline the different components of their branding strategy. Illustration principles from Shopify’s brand style guide. Make it dummy-proof by including what not to do: Follow the lead of top brands like Spotify, Medium, Facebook, and Snapchat and create clear guidelines to make sure your logo is represented in the best light. It lets everyone know exactly how to present your brand to the world. If you find that something about your brand is not working, fix it! 2. How to Create a Style Guide to Ensure Your Brand Standards. It’s filled to the brim with tips, examples, and templates: A ton of the world’s top tech companies have rebranded over last few years, and dedicated some serious time and effort into developing thorough brand style guides. Atlassian, a well respected software company, has made their brand story all about personality. Well, Trello loves to feature custom illustrations, but knows it can be hard for different artists to produce illustrations with a cohesive style. Specify when and where to use infographics and data visualizations, and include style preferences and technical conventions. Finally, specify whether your copy is aligned left, aligned right, or centered. Many businesses draw inspiration from brand archetypes, and the best brand stories add in a dash of their own personality. Solidifying the principles of your brand now will save you from potential mayhem down the road when your business grows into more than you alone can keep track of. Photographic style is just as important as illustrative style. Take inspiration from today’s top brands and make your own brand style guide to allow everyone representing your brand to produce collateral quickly, efficiently, and with confidence. She’s particularly interested in helping people communicate complex information. Whether you work with photos or illustrations, providing lots of examples and thorough descriptions is the way to go! A brand style guide is a rulebook containing specifications on everything that plays a role in the look and feel of your brand–everything from typography and color to logos and imagery. to add vitality to their brand communications. In. This lighthearted stance has helped them establish their voice after a recent and. All of these brand images are, of course, different from one another. The more consistent your brand image, the more customers will resonate with your company. And consistency is necessary in order to communicate with excellence. Once again, Skype has knocked it out of the park with a simple but effective summary, contrasting words that they like with words that they don’t like. Need some help creating your own brand guidelines? Brand Guide isn’t the same a style guide. Now you know why a good style guide is important, what it should look like, and what to include. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, a brand story defines and describes the things that a company cares about most. Are you quirky and light-hearted, or serious and authoritative? Specify your font and design hierarchy with respect to font sizes (big for headers, medium for subheaders and smaller longer paragraphs) and font weights (light, bold, heavy, etc. “At Dove, we have a vision of a world where beauty is a source of confidence, not anxiety,” the brand coos. All you need is about 30 minutes to think about your brand/what you want it to be, 30 minutes to identify the key information, and another 30 to make it look nice. In your brand style guide, clearly define your brand’s color palette. Fashion retailer Everlane has a great brand story that is the driving force behind their company’s products and their customer interactions. Elements of a brand style guide. Your brand story sets the tone for your company’s decision-making process within the organization. In addition to including your brand story in your style guide, you’ll want to include your brand voice. Whether you, like Twitter and Snapchat, have one primary brand color and some secondary shades: , you have specific color combinations you want your designers to stick with: trends of the moment, Spotify has even included realistic examples of where. It doesn’t hurt to give some concrete examples, either. Check out our article on how to choose infographic fonts–all the same rules apply! Every business needs a brand style guide to establish the consistency of their brand’s image. On the first day of my internship, I was shown to my temporary working space where the company’s brand style guide was waiting for me on … A brand style guide should be an ever-evolving document, which is why we’ve made editing and, communicates to the world what your brand is all about. It’s the one thing that everyone should immediately recognize as belonging to you, and only you. Usually about half the width of the logo itself, these image-free zones give logos space to breathe to ensure they maintain visual impact. Allowing font choices to slip under your radar can really cheapen your brand. There are 6 key elements of a brand style guide: Before we dive in to the details of each, it’s important to first understand…. One example of a compelling brand voice is that of Dove, which aims to be uplifting and empowering in its web copy and ad content. By documenting them in a guide, your brand will be consistently expressed by an employee, a vendor, a freelancer—whoever needs it to create something for your business. Additional print assets such as comp slips, business cards, invoices etc should also be included in the manual along with the correct dimensions, bleed marks etc. Twitter and Snapchat have both kept it simple, each choosing one font to use for pretty much everything: Funnily enough, Trello has chosen the same typeface as Twitter, but takes it a few steps further by specifying a design hierarchy of font styles and sizes, text colors, and styles for lists and paragraphs: Depending on your product or business, sometimes it’s necessary to specify different fonts for different platforms. Now that you have your logo down, it’s important to define your brand’s exact color palette. Berkeley’s brand guidelines describe their photographic style as light, airy, and natural, only featuring images that fit into one of three categories: topical, cultural, or historical. This consistency is important for building our brand’s authority and recognition. Dove’s brand voice is friendly, inspirational, encouraging, and soothing, and the reason its voice is so powerful is precisely because the brand sticks to this voice so consistently across its copy. Professional? Create a brand style guide so you can put these specifications into writing. Check out this FREE ebook we created with our friends at HubSpot. A simple Brand Overview can be an introduction to who you are, what you do, and how you do it differently than every other X out there. Ultimately, you should be stating the direction and goals of your business as well as the specific elements that make up your brand … Brand stories can look pretty different at different companies, but there is one key thread that ties them all together: Brand stories wrap up a company’s vision, mission, and core values in one nice little package. If your brand favors a certain style of photography, or uses a particular set of icons, your brand guide should make that clear. A brand style guide should be an ever-evolving document, which is why we’ve made editing and sharing a breeze. Maybe they all take the form of playful illustrations, or perhaps they share a common tone. Don’t send mixed messages when it comes to your brand. Generally speaking, a brand style guide is a set of rules that establishes consistency in the ways a brand presents itself to the world. A brand voice is just as important as the brand style. To enhance your brand experience, use a brand style guide to ensure you’re applying typography consistently across your collateral. What does it represent about your brand’s personality, mission, or values? A brand style guide is a document (it can even be one page) that references the specifics of your brand visuals, so that every time you create a new image for your brand – or hire a designer to do so – the guidelines will be in place to maintain a cohesive look. This means outlining what fonts are used for what purposes (in print and on the web). But how will you make sure other companies talking about your services represent your brand with the same degree of accuracy and precision? It’s time to create one for your company. This guide is about how to create a brand book for your small business in 2021, however let’s discuss first what’s a brand book! The Front Cover of a style guide is the first port of call for a reader, and as a result is a great place to make a statement about your brand identity. —our version of a brand style guide—that lists the best fonts, colors, logo iterations, etc. Include the marketing team, sales team, and any other creatives working on your marketing and products when creating a style guide. Decide what information is most important and form a hierarchy to be used throughout. From here, define how these details will be expressed by the look, voice and behavior of your brand. In the past, brand colors were simple. Pssst…Want to learn how to build your own Brand Style Guide from scratch? How to Create a Brand Style Guide written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing. A typical brand story includes your company’s origins, the problem it sets out to solve, the mission and values it carries forward, and its vision for the future. is one of my favorites. By giving tons of examples they make it impossible to go awry with messaging. Before you create a style guide, you need to know your brand. Along the same vein, Shopify goes all out, specifying when and where to use illustrations, the principles with which to critique illustrations, and the stylistic choices (like background color, level of detail, scale, and blending modes) that make an illustration “on-brand”. Style guide’s are usually website or app specific but can reach father. But how do you ensure brand consistency when you have a number of departments, partners, or agencies producing your branded collateral? But at the same time, they do require some thematic consistency in order to create a unified brand message. Depending on your product or business, sometimes it’s necessary to specify different fonts for different platforms. https://www.vyond.com/resources/how-to-create-a-video-style-guide Want to learn how to build your own Brand Style Guide from scratch? Create your Brand Identity. A brand story is one of the six main components of your brand style guide. And finally, provide instructions about how much white space should be used around your logo. Example: The Avalere Health style guide includes a handy TOC to make it easy to access the desired info. Check out our article on. Just as with your logo guidelines, your font guidelines need to be very specific to ensure that your brand is represented with accuracy and precision. It guides the design for all your content, from blog posts and presentations to office spaces and business cards. If you’re unsure of your brand colors’ hex codes or CMYK values, you can always use a color conversion tool like this one to help figure it out. A brand style guide is a set of rules for how your brand will be portrayed, both online and off. You can think of your brand’s style guide as a reference book that people can use a guide for representing your brand. Everything about your imagery, including style, color, and content, contributes to the perception of your brand. into developing thorough brand style guides. Midori spreads visual communication tricks and tips as an Information Designer at Venngage. They’ve really captured a playful, down-to-earth tone that rings true with their brand: There’s nothing wrong with a more traditional approach, either. Their web content, for instance, shows transparent glimpses into factories and explains the garments’ price breakdown. This story forms the basis of Everlane’s interactions with their customers. The company’s story centers on three values: “Exceptional quality,” “Ethical factories,” and “Radical Transparency.” They set out to disrupt a status quo in retail—high-priced garments of relatively low quality from morally questionable sources—and instead operate on the principle of fairness with both their employees and their customers. Voice. Light is also used as an active element in our photography, sometimes to the point of slight overexposure. Don’t forget to include the necessary hex codes, RGB values, and CMYK color codes to make sure your colors are presented consistently across media. Being clear about our typeface guidelines helps us achieve brand consistency across all channels.