Best Practices for Creating A Style Guide For Your Brand

What is a Brand Style Guide?

A brand style guide is a document that includes the rules and brand guidelines for how to use the brand's identity in various media. It can be used by your team working under your brand's name through any communication or advertising channels.

Why Should You Create A Brand Style Guide? 

A well-made style guide will make it easier for everyone to understand what is expected of them working for your company. It will also help to reduce any confusion that arises from different people interpreting things differently, which could lead to mistakes or inconsistencies in how your company is portrayed to your audience. To demonstrate, We’ll be showing during this blog a case study of a brand we worked on to reflect on each brand element. The brand is‘GO4; body care products that are designed and engineered for athletes’ specific needs.

Example of brand consistency in visual designs across different applications in GO4 project.

Your objective is not today or tomorrow but a lifetime. You want anyone reading your brand guidelines book to understand your brand entirely; it will save you and your team a lot of time.

Section 1 | Defining Your Brand

This part is about the intro and story of your brand. If someone is meeting your brand for the first time, they shall at least know the essence of your brand after introducing them to your story.

Brand Story 

This is where you speak about your brand. Feel free to write from the heart what comes to your mind. Don’t worry about copywriting and professional writing. This will be an easy part at the last stage to fine-tune your wording. The hard part is actually putting your ideas and telling a heart-to-heart brand story. 

People love honesty and can be emotionally attached to a story with a human side that they can relate to. It’s your brand; you will definitely be able to tell an interesting story about it.

Brand Values

Don’t just write this part because you have to fill in a blank space. First, you have to believe it and be real about it. Never be vague about your values. Keep them clear, memorable, meaningful, and most importantly actionable. For example “Integrity” value can be vague when it comes to explaining how you will apply it, while “Honesty” is clear and actionable beyond doubt. 

To sum up, make sure your values are well-defined, unique, real, and timeless. 

Brand Personality

This long topic needs attention. Your brand personality is what defines all your outputs. To simplify, imagine your brand as a human being. Who is he/she? What’s his age? What activities does he do? Your brand personality makes it easy for content creators to write using your brand vibe. Is it serious? Informative? Funny? Keep asking questions and imagining potential brand situations and your personality will be well-defined. 

Again, write it in the way you want spontaneously. Professional writing is the very final step. Never let terms and structure stop your flow of ideas. You know it all already, and you just need to write it down.

Communication GO4 brand personality of athletes and sports lifestyle with an image.

Tone of voice

We covered before how to build an effective Tone of Voice for your brand. Study your brand persona and extract tone of voice guidelines from it. You don’t need to go into details, but you need to create as many examples of tone-of-voice applications as you can. Let’s be clear; examples work like magic. They save you lots of words and time. Check out more about Defining Your Brand’s Tone of Voice.

Tone of Voice Example: 

Positive: Always looking at the full half of the glass and promoting a bright future.

Friendly: Showing care about customers and lightly touching their problems.

Authoritative: Speaks in confidence when talking about formulas and scientific facts.

Enthusiastic: Always encouraging athletes to reach their maximum potential.

SECTION 2 | Design Elements

This is the eye candy part. The part where there are fewer less or no words and more visuals and art.

Here is where your brand appears visually and catches the eyes of your target audience. Here are the basic elements you must include in your brand style guide.

Brand Logo

Show your logo and explain the logo anatomy. Not necessarily with lots of words but visually. 

Be generous in explaining logo variations, in terms of size, color, and backgrounds. Show examples of logo use in different situations like printing, social media,.., etc.

Don’t forget to show logo misuse and compare it to the right use. It works like magic.

Colors

Include brand colors and color palettes in your brand style guide. This is important to unify brand identity and ensure color consistency. Also, specify with examples of different color applications and take care of printing applications that can sometimes be different from digital applications, such as primary, secondary, and accent colors. Also, different color formats (RGB, CMYK, Pantone) and others.

Typography Guide

is an important visual identity element of any branding style guide. The fonts and typefaces chosen for the design can have a big impact on how the brand’s message is conveyed, and you should carefully select them. A good way is to design your brand style guide at the layout stage using brand typeface and multiple brand fonts.

Illustrations and Icons

Illustrations play a key role in creating a memorable and recognizable brand. With illustrations, businesses can create a visual identity that helps establish an emotional connection with their target audience. When combined with social media and packaging design, illustrations become an even more powerful tool for branding success. More importantly, illustrations combined with sound digital and packaging design strategies will help bring life to your brand in the eyes of customers and foster loyalty among them. It's not just about having illustrations - it's about leveraging the combination of illustrations, digital design, and packaging to build your overall brand identity.

The following illustrations of GO4 branding project visually communicate their message and values of sports life and spirit with no words.

Photography

A photography section of a brand style guide is essential if you want to have a photo-based brand or if photography is a part of your marketing outputs. For some brands, it is the only way for them to maintain a consistent look and feel. This section should include information about the type of equipment, lighting, and other photography-related details.

Conclusion

A brand style guide is documentation that saves your brand consistency from the tides of time. It keeps it preserved and helps it develop in the right direction. We offered an easy way to start your Brand Style Guide. Yet you will always have your own customization. Feel free to view multiple brand style guides in your market and outside to get inspired. You can watch some of our brand style guide work we publish as well here. You can also check GO4 project we have been referencing.

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