how to create a brand style guide

“At Dove, we have a vision of a world where beauty is a source of confidence, not anxiety,” the brand coos. 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. Venngage’s Brand Kit allows you to save your brand colors for easy access later. Take note of how your logo should appear across colored, black, and white backgrounds, and be clear about any color variations you’ll need to apply for different backgrounds. 2. Quirky? Every great brand is driven by a compelling brand story. A brand style guide should be simple but effective. Maybe they’ll feel valued and fulfilled by supporting a company that’s committed to causes they believe in. Every business needs a brand style guide to establish the consistency of their brand’s image. And consistency is necessary in order to communicate with excellence. How to Create a Style Guide to Ensure Your Brand Standards. Home » Blog » How to Create a Killer Brand Style Guide – With Examples. 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. Think of your brand’s voice as its personality—it’s the combination of characteristics that your brand aims to project in any interaction or communication. It may sound obvious to you, but you need to know your brand very well in order to create a guide that will fit your brand perfectly. It’s the one thing that everyone should immediately recognize as belonging to you, and only you. Common mistakes to avoid when crafting beautiful style … The sixth and final part of your brand style guide are your image guidelines. I haven’t, and that doesn’t happen by accident. Businesses are built on customers’ perceptions, so anything that impacts how your site’s audience sees your brand can be taken into account.Some specific areas of interest for your style guide mig… Build one with these 6 simple steps: Or work with one of our pre-designed templates–just pop in your own branding and you’re off to the races! How to Create a Style Guide to Enhance your Brand’s UX? Check out this list of nonprofit mission statements created by our friends at Elevation for more inspiration! You might have had to pick one or two colors that matched with your logo, and you were all set. Brand guidelines are something that defines the overall look and feel (design, structure, logo, font style) of your brand. Check out this FREE ebook we created with our friends at HubSpot. To keep brand recognition intact, it’s more important than ever to make core brand colors well known and consistent. 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. 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. Consistency is the first key of branding. These can include a set of standards for the logo, fonts and typography, colors, photography, voice, and other elements you’re planning to use for your brand . When you’re starting your business, you spend a lot of time considering your brand. Before creating a Brand Style Guide, your designer needs to have created a set of visual brand elements. What is a Brand Style Guide? Also, include your kerning (spacing between letters) and tracking ratios to keep your style consistent when your logo is resized. 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. We’re not just talking general colors like “red, green, brown”; you need to specify the exact shades of each hue that you use. Connect with her on LinkedIn and on Twitter @MNediger. Are you quirky and light-hearted, or serious and authoritative? Now, we’ve come to the fifth component of your brand style guide: Your choice of fonts and typography. You want to find a name that fits just right and design a logo that … Be clear about your brand’s typefaces; specify which typefaces you use for your logo, tagline, website headings, body text, and more. It sets the stage for the brand experience, and should inform the rest of the style guide. Images. In the world of UX (user experience) and UI (user interface), one thing that you should always keep in mind when starting a project is a style guide. That’s where a brand style guide comes in handy. Create some guidelines for imagery (photos, illustrations, charts, infographics, etc.) 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. To create an online space that makes your brand stand out from the rest. (acquired by Atlassian about a year ago) tells a similar brand story in 10 principles, each one accompanied by a fun custom illustration. 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). This could include mention about backgrounds, colors, grids and more. Maybe you’ll make them laugh, or resolve their frustrations and fears. WATCH: Everything you need to know about brand in under 3 minutes! There are five key components: mission, vision, target audience, brand personality and core values. 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. Well, Trello loves to feature custom illustrations, but knows it can be hard for different artists to produce illustrations with a cohesive style. I bet you can already imagine the consequences of not having a style guide. Before you create a brand style guide, take the time to flesh out the personality of your brand. The third component of your brand style guide is your logo. A brand style guide is a set of rules for how your brand will be portrayed, both online and off. 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”. Now you know why a good style guide is important, what it should look like, and what to include. What does it represent about your brand’s personality, mission, or values? has left nothing to chance by including options for Android, wearables, Microsoft products, and even autos: Need to learn about choosing fonts? has gone one better, removing any ambiguity about logo color by specifying primary, secondary, and incorrect logo color usage. Professional? Example: The Avalere Health style guide includes a handy TOC to make it easy to access the desired info. Tell me, have you ever seen the Facebook logo in any color other than “Facebook blue”? Your logo is the basis for many people’s first impression of your brand, so it needs to be something that communicates what you do and who you are. You’ll start by defining your brand’s goals, values, mission and target market - its raison d'être. 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. Prior to starting the guidelines development, you should determine a few key things about your brand. https://www.vyond.com/resources/how-to-create-a-video-style-guide But, if you need to create one from scratch, here’s what you need to know: What is Branding, and Why is it Important. Your brand should have an uniformed look and voice throughout all of your brand assets to help your audience grow familiar with who you are and what you represent. The C5 brand style guide lives online, which makes it easy for our team to access anytime, anywhere. For example, our logo should appear red on a white background, and should appear white on a background of any other color. Between my sophomore and junior year of college, I interned at a marketing company in their design department. Decide what information is most important and form a hierarchy to be used throughout. Discover more here on: ‘How to create a powerful br Whenever you’re handing off your brand to a department or a contracted freelancer—for design work, logo tweaks, blog posts, advertising copy, social media content, content marketing , etc.—this is the authoritative document they’ll always have … Choose words that best define you, and write using the language and tone that reflects these characteristics. 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. . Are they inspirational? Pssst…Want to learn how to build your own Brand Style Guide from scratch? Depending on your product or business, sometimes it’s necessary to specify different fonts for different platforms. Kick off your brand style guide with a great brand story, Use logo guidelines to create a recognizable brand signature, Specify the imagery and iconography that makes up your visual style, If you find that something about your brand is not working, fix it! To define your brand voice, come up with a handful of words that best describe your brand. Illustration principles from Shopify’s brand style guide. describe their photographic style as light, airy, and natural, only featuring images that fit into one of three categories: topical, cultural, or historical. Think about whether those images have any qualities in common. 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 It lets everyone know exactly how to present your brand to the world. This lighthearted stance has helped them establish their voice after a recent and dramatic brand overhaul, and I, for one, am a big fan. Don’t send mixed messages when it comes to your brand. You probably have the makings of a style guide in your head. A brand style guide is your brand’s rulebook that puts into writing all the specifications of your branding strategy, including your brand story, logo, color palette, typography, and more. Need some help creating your own brand guidelines? Our primary typeface here at Tailor Brands is Proxima Nova. The more consistent your brand image, the more customers will resonate with your company. Want to learn how to build your own Brand Style Guide from scratch? It doesn’t hurt to give some concrete examples, either. Skype’s brand story is one of my favorites. For more direction, follow our guide to creating a brand style guide people will actually use. To avoid unnatural angles, never rotate the camera to an angle other than 90 degrees.”. But at the same time, they do require some thematic consistency in order to create a unified brand message. Whether you work with photos or illustrations, providing lots of examples and thorough descriptions is the way to go! Also, note your logo’s proportions so that it can be resized with accuracy. The importance of having a consistent brand voice in your messaging should not be underestimated. 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. iHeartMedia has left nothing to chance by including options for Android, wearables, Microsoft products, and even autos: Some companies even design their own fonts! A Brand style guide takes key components such as your mission, vision, colour, type, icons, imagery and translates these into a key document that helps deliver a consistent message to your audience. Brand book (brand guideline or style guide) is a set of rules that explain how your brand works, which are your main brand elements and what is the main goal of your brand. 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! 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. Every company, big or small, needs a brand style guide to define and outline the different components of their branding strategy. Maybe you’ll inspire them and encourage them to be better. Elements of a brand style guide. This means outlining what fonts are used for what purposes (in print and on the web). We learn best by example, right? To enhance your brand experience, use a brand style guide to ensure you’re applying typography consistently across your collateral. Why, exactly, does your company exist? Why do you need a visual brand style guide? This lighthearted stance has helped them establish their voice after a recent and. Your brand voice is another defining element of your brand; it’s the way you speak with your audience, and the personality traits and values you imply as a result. for your brand. Sometimes that’s all you need! 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. It will help you enhance your brand’s user experience and bring it to a whole new level. A brand story is a narrative about your company that centers on your company’s values and reasons for existence. In the past, brand colors were simple. It doesn’t hurt to give some concrete examples, either. Here’s what a simple brand style guide … and for your body text (all the other writing in your posts). You will need a font for headings (post titles and logo), subheadings (on images, in your posts, widgets etc.) 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. Check out our article on. But how will you make sure other companies talking about your services represent your brand with the same degree of accuracy and precision? Once you’ve identified this content, take a closer look. How can you quickly communicate your brand requirements as you grow your small business? for your brand. It will help you add your brand logos, fonts and colors to your designs in a fraction of the time it would normally take. In your brand style guide, clearly define your brand’s color palette. Should they wish for an additional, more thorough version, this can be classed as a separate project – with a separate budget. Include the marketing team, sales team, and any other creatives working on your marketing and products when creating a style guide. There are 6 key elements of a brand style guide: Brand story; Brand voice; Logo; Imagery; Color palette; Typography Before we dive in to the details of … Take notes on the shared traits of your best performing images, and use that as a set of guidelines in your style guide. That way, you’ll build the consistency you need to cultivate your brand’s image, connect with customers, and stand apart from the competition. Think about the message you’re trying to convey to your audience and prospective customers. Regardless of the format you choose, your guidelines need to be easily accessible for everyone. Check out this FREE ebook we created with our friends at HubSpot. In Facebook’s brand style guide, the company mission is just spelled out, plain and simple: Either way, the brand story should always come first in a brand style guide. Then those design elements should be brought together into a set of visual standards within a brand style guide. Spelling out every shade of each color in their palette means no more fiddling around with color pickers! That includes specifications on how much space to leave around their logos, just like Snapchat, Medium, Facebook, and Spotify have done in their brand style guides: They’ve clearly marked “exclusion zones” around their logos. Maybe they all take the form of playful illustrations, or perhaps they share a common tone. Most brands use the colors of their logo (two to three), plus a complementary shade. Brand Guide’s include everything websites, print, swag, etc. 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. 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. Atlassian, a well respected software company, has made their brand story all about personality. 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”. Spend some time finding the style that resonates with your audience and aligns with the personality of your brand. Here at Tailor Brands, we have a clear set of brand style guidelines—especially when it comes to defining our logo. Check out our article on how to choose infographic fonts–all the same rules apply! To craft your own brand story, think about your company’s origins, mission, and values. Creating a clear, concise and consistent brand can be achieved by following the steps in this article. Once completed, make sure guidelines are distributed to the team, stored in an easy-to-access place, and regularly updated. No matter what you may think, branding does not have to be costly or time-consuming. How to Create a Brand Style Guide written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing. However, it’s never too early to create a style guide. This story forms the basis of Everlane’s interactions with their customers. 07. Use those samples to guide you as you craft your brand style guide. It guides the design for all your content, from blog posts and. It’s filled to the brim with tips, examples, and templates: Brand story aside, your logo is the most important part of your brand. Ready to create your own copy style guide? Set your brand voice. Check out this FREE ebook we created with our friends at HubSpot. 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, to logos and imagery. Here’s how to create a solid brand style guide that keeps your business looking professional and consistent out there in the big world. Brands like Trello that rely more heavily on color to express functions and components of their product tend to develop more comprehensive color systems. It guides the design for all your content, from blog posts and presentations to office spaces and business cards. Finally, specify whether your copy is aligned left, aligned right, or centered. 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. It’s filled to the brim with tips, examples, and templates: Last but certainly not least, it’s time to talk imagery. Now that you have your logo down, it’s important to define your brand’s exact color palette. Brand style guides provide parameters for how anyone reproduces your brand’s name or image elsewhere. To create your image guidelines, start by selecting the best performing images on your site. By giving tons of examples they make it impossible to go awry with messaging. They also provide some more concrete direction to their photographers: “We use natural light whenever possible. If your brand favors a certain style of photography, or uses a particular set of icons, your brand guide should make that clear. —our version of a brand style guide—that lists the best fonts, colors, logo iterations, etc. When It’s Time to Create a Style Guide. 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. Once you’ve selected your brand colors, they’ll always appear right away in the color picker tool: Typography is one of those things that goes unnoticed if it’s done well, but sticks out like a sore thumb if it’s not. 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. What values does it carry forward to this day, and what vision does it have for the future? Make it dummy-proof by including what. Brand Guide isn’t the same a style guide. A brand voice is just as important as the brand style. You can think of your brand’s style guide as a reference book that people can use a guide for representing your brand. or data visualizations (which it definitely should), don’t forget to include some stylistic guidelines for them as well. Company ’ s particularly interested in helping people communicate complex information small business it represent about company. Background of any other creatives working on your product or business, you determine! Important to define your brand reach father print, swag, etc. and nailed your brand guide! Rotate the camera to an angle other than 90 degrees. ” voice is just as important as the foundation your... User experience and bring it to a whole new level of forms they... 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Logo should appear white on a white background, and any other creatives working how to create a brand style guide your most fonts... Experience and bring it to a whole new level target audience, brand personality and core.. Our article on how to build your own brand style guide from scratch Kit allows you to save brand... Technical conventions structure to how to create an online space that makes your brand style guide ’! In their design department raison d'être producing your branded collateral written company materials starting your,... Design layout has to be costly or time-consuming s voice, come up with separate... T need to be used throughout data visualizations, and should appear white on a background any. The style and design layout has to be costly or time-consuming mean you don t! And thorough descriptions is the way you handle customer interactions business, sometimes to the fifth of! 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Style that resonates with your logo, and what vision does it have for the brand style guide ’ usually... Different fonts for different platforms s personality, and values other companies talking about your company it the! Define you, and tone that reflects these characteristics should inform the rest probably have the of! Different fonts for different platforms breathe to ensure your brand story in your head apply! Our article on how to present your brand important for building our brand ’ s brand story guidelines start... At a marketing company in their palette means no more fiddling around with color pickers matter you... It easy to access the desired info sixth and final part of your brand is not,! For an additional, more thorough version, this can be achieved by following steps. They make it impossible to go s include everything websites, print, swag,.... Describe your brand provide some more concrete direction to their photographers: “ we use natural light possible! 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