Why Does Your Brand Require a Style Guide?

The importance of a brand style guide is often overlooked by designers. A brand style guide can be defined as a document or book consisting of a well-defined set of rules on how a brand is presented to public, both online and offline.

A brand style guide not only saves your time and money but, also takes care of frustrating issues making it easier for you to create and maintain marketing materials for the long run. A style guide for your brand provide instructions on how things should exactly be done as well as gives insight into why it should be done that way.

Why Your Brand Needs It

Though, at times small companies with a single designer may not feel the need to have a style guide but, it is always good to have one. A style guide ensures that visual elements produced are consistent at all times.

Now, let’s assume that you are the lone designer of a company. You work extremely hard towards developing a personal brand for your company. You not only design their logo but, websites, brochures, business cards and every other stuff that are used as marketing materials by your company.

It may happen that, over the course of next couple of years, your company triples in size, feeling the need to hire another designer to take care of some of the workload. You may be bestowed upon with the responsibility of teaching that person the guidelines of your company’s brand simply from memory. It may also happen that you may forget to convey something important and the blame comes to you.

It becomes a lot easier when your company has a style guide educating the person about logo size, colors, fonts used, placement and more. You can also take the example of a freelancer where, even after working for different clients, it becomes a lot easier to return to the work done a year or more back with a style guide. No need to go through old files simply to figure out what was the color used in the logo.

Another huge benefit of having a style guide is that, your brand does not get ruined by a less knowledgeable designer who fails to understand how the design works for your company. A style guide makes the job a lot easier as well as consistent. Though, every style guide is unique but, of course there are some elements that remain common with almost every style guide.

Placement and Size of Logo

Majority of logos tend to lose their effect when they are too small in size. This is the reason why most businesses make use of a minimum size to display their logo. On top of that, while designing a business logo, the empty space to surround the logo also needs to be specified along with other things like background color, whether it will be displayed in alternate colors, etc.

Fonts

Brands should always remain consistent with their fonts used across various marketing materials, online as well as offline. Thus, it is important to list out fonts with character sets and examples. Apart from the fonts used, you also need to specify things like size of photo captions or headings.

Icons or Imagery

If your brand makes use of specific icon sets (or icons) that are used exclusively, or certain images frequently used, then they should also be specified in the guide. It is always a good idea to include a link to the icon set as icon names get easily confusing because they are not 100% unique.

Colors

When it comes to colors of your brand, you need to provide as much details as possible about them. This indicates that not only you need to include the hex codes in your style guide for web use but, equivalent Pantone color values and CMYK for print. Not all the colors get easily transferred between print and web usage, so you should specify preferences that will ensure that you do not end up colors clashing with the original design.

Content Guidelines

Though, at times some style guides do not require specific instructions on how content should be written but, maintaining a specific tone when it comes to written communications, certainly helps a lot. You may focus on certain phrases or words that should always be incorporated while there may some which you want to avoid at any cost.

A Few Other Elements

Your brand style guide may also include the following elements:

• Brand vision, history as well as personality information
• Grid standards and design layouts used online as well as print advertising
• Guidelines for social media which may include type of posts to be shared and usage of various branding elements on social networking sites.

The ultimate aim of your brand’s style guide is to expedite and simplify the entire process for the designers. It is vital to make sure that it always serves the purpose it has been created to serve.