How to Develop a Brand Style Guide and Ensure Consistency Across All Channels
A strong brand leaves an instant impression on customers. The look, voice, and feel of your brand should be instantly recognizable across all touchpoints.
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A brand style guide is the secret weapon for rapidly growing brands to maintain visual and verbal consistency. This comprehensive document codifies all brand standards into a single source of truth.
In this in-depth guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know to create a polished brand style guide. Let’s dive in!
Elements to Include in Your Brand Style Guide
A thorough brand style guide should cover all the visual and written elements that compose your brand identity. Here are some key sections to include:
Brand Story and Mission
Start with a narrative overview of your brand history, values, personality, and mission. This grounds all brand decisions in your core purpose. Cover:- Origin story and founders
- Values, vision, and purpose
- Tone of voice and personality
- Target customer archetypes
- Brand promise and motto
Logo Usage Guidelines
Provide clear instructions on using your logos correctly. Include:- Primary and alternate logo versions
- Ideal logo sizing, spacing, and placement
- Acceptable and unacceptable logo treatments
- Approved logo use cases
- Color palettes and typography specs
- Downloadable logo asset files
Visual Identity Guidelines
Specify standards for visual branding assets like:- Color palettes with hex codes or Pantone values
- Typography details including fonts, weights, sizes, and line spacing
- Examples of ideal graphic design treatments
- Rules for photography styles and image editing
- Illustration guidelines if applicable
- Graphs, charts, and data visualization standards
- Iconography and usage guidelines
Marketing Guidelines
Detail expectations for branded marketing materials including:- Print collateral like business cards, letterhead, and brochures
- Presentation templates
- Website and ad banners
- Social media templates and best practices
- Email newsletter headers and footers
- Signage and trade show displays
Brand Voice and Tone Guidelines
Provide a verbal style guide covering:- The overarching voice, tone, and diction for writing
- Brand terminology, taglines, and boilerplate descriptions
- Content strategy for different formats like blogs, ads, emails, ebooks
- Rules for writing different audiences like customers, investors, press
Co-Branding and Partnership Guidelines
If your brand frequently partners with other companies, include:- Rules for visually integrating complementary brands
- Editorial guidelines for co-created content
- Asset sharing permissions and protocols
- Contract templates to protect brand standards
Governance
Specify who oversees creating and maintaining the style guide along with how new requests or exceptions get reviewed and approved. You may also include a creative process for photoshoots, asset requests, content reviews, and anything that passes through the marketing team. This streamlines future efforts to adhere to the style guide.
How to Actually Create Your Style Guide
Now that you know what to include, here is a step-by-step process for putting your style guide together:
Audit Your Current Assets and Values
First, thoroughly audit your existing brand assets and messaging:
- Collect all current logos, fonts, colors, graphics, photos, and content.
- Review your assets with a critical eye. Flag any inconsistencies, redundancies, or outdated material.
- Identify gaps where standards are missing.
- Revisit your core brand values and viewpoint. Get alignment on ideal voice and tone.
Design the Style Guide Format
Decide on an organizing structure and templates for the guide.
- Group related topics into clear sections or chapters.
- Sketch out clean, easy-to-reference page layouts tailored to each section.
- Standardize formatting like fonts, colors, and graphic treatments.
Craft the Guidelines
With sections defined, it’s time to create the guidelines.
For each section:
- Succinctly explain the specific standards and rules. Use bullet points or tables where helpful.
- Show visual examples of ideal treatments following the guidelines.
- Provide downloads of logos, graphic templates, fonts, and other assets.
Socialize for Feedback
Before finalizing, socialize the style guide internally with key stakeholders.
- Invite feedback from executives, marketing, sales, support, partners, and anyone else interfacing with the brand.
- Update based on constructive feedback to cover any gaps.
- Gain alignment and buy-in on the standards.
Publish and Disseminate
Once finished, publish your style guide and spread the word!
- Post on your website and intranet to provide easy access.
- Hold a training session to walk teams through how to use it.
- Send out a company-wide announcement of the new guide.
- Include reference links in creative briefs and project kickoffs.
Maintain and Iterate
Treat your style guide as a living document. As your brand evolves, keep the guide updated.
- Schedule periodic reviews to keep standards fresh and relevant.
- Add new examples and templates as you produce more branded content.
- Refine processes around guide usage and governance.
Investing the time upfront to codify clear, consistent brand standards will streamline all future creative efforts.
Using Brand Style Guides to Strengthen Consistency
Armed with a polished style guide, you can ensure brand consistency across every customer touchpoint. Here are some key ways to leverage your new guide:
Create Branded Templates
Develop templates for materials like presentations, ads, social posts, product specs, emails, case studies, etc. Populate with approved fonts, colors, logos, and boilerplate content. This shortcuts future content creation.
Centralize Assets
Set up a master folder or cloud storage with the latest logo files, fonts, graphics, imagery, and document templates. This gives everyone instant access to approved assets.
Guide External Partners
Share excerpts from your style guide with external partners like agencies, freelancers, influencers, vendors, and affiliated brands you co-create content with. This aligns work to your standards.
Onboard New Hires
Add branded design, writing, and governance basics from the style guide to your employee onboarding training. This instills best practices from day one.
Conduct Brand Refreshes
When refreshing your visual identity or messaging, let your codified style guide standards guide the project. Identify what to retain or evolve.
Explore Automation
Look for ways to automate style guide enforcement – for example:
- Email templates auto-populated with approved content
- Design software preset with brand colors and fonts
- Website CMS limiting formatting options
- Content apps applying brand voice rules
Automation helps scale brand consistency as you grow.
Boost Knowledge and Pride
Help employees across the company better understand and take pride in your brand values by socializing the style guide. This builds engagement.
A comprehensive brand style guide is the best tool for rapidly scaling companies to maintain recognizable, consistent branding across channels and teams. Take the time to codify standards so colleagues both in-house and externally have clear creative direction.
At Moobila we can help audit your current branding and produce a polished style guide tailored to your strategic goals.
Let’s talk about branding!
Entrepreneurs Also Ask
Maintaining brand consistency is like keeping your promise to your customers. It’s all about ensuring that your brand is recognized and remembered. This can be achieved by consistently using the same logo, colors, fonts, and tone of voice across all your marketing materials and platforms. It’s like wearing your favorite outfit - it’s uniquely you and people recognize you for it!
When it comes to creating brand guidelines, think of it as crafting a rulebook for your brand. This guide serves as a reference for everyone in your team to ensure that they’re all on the same page when representing your brand. It’s like a cookbook for your brand, providing the ingredients and steps to create the perfect brand representation.
A brand style guide is like your brand’s fashion guide. It includes everything from your brand’s color palette, typography, and imagery to your logo usage, tone of voice, and even your brand’s mission and values. It’s like a wardrobe for your brand, outlining what to wear and when to wear it to make the best impression! So, whether you’re designing a new ad or writing a blog post, this guide ensures that everything aligns with your brand’s identity.
Written by: Rabeea,
Senior Content Lead Moobila
Senior Content Lead Moobila
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