A branding guideline, brand style guide, or a style guide is a document that details how your company presents itself to the world. It's a reference tool that enables your startup to consistently delineate what your brand looks, feels and sounds like.
Your brand identity is your company's personality and the primary way the world recognizes you. The consistency of your brand identity helps establish trust, while inconsistency can confuse and alienate customers.
When you develop a logo, a color palette for all materials, and specific font styles and formatting, you create the visual components of your branding guidelines. These visual elements are foundational to a cohesive brand identity.
However, your branding guidelines also need to include emotional elements to connect with your target audience. The way your brand comes across—whether through spoken or written communication—is critical. Your brand voice guides your tone, and your tone must consider the individuals it’s addressing.
Your branding guidelines enable you to communicate consistently across all channels. As your startup grows, a comprehensive brand style guide ensures consistent communication from all teams, including any freelancers brought in.
At the bottom of this post, we've linked to a [free] social media branding checklist. You can download it by clicking on the button below. But first, let's discuss what a brand style guide is and why it matters.
What Is a Brand Style Guide and Why Is It Important?
Your brand is the outward presentation of your company. Your brand projects your identity and defines how clients, customers, and partners view your startup.
A brand style guide is a document that describes, defines, and provides examples of what your brand should look like across all media channels. This guide is the primary blueprint for your company's personality and tone. A comprehensive brand style guide can include details on grammar, voice, word usage, and point of view.
Creating a brand style guide is a step many companies overlook. Without this unifying document, inconsistent content and branding can emerge. Over time, this inconsistent messaging confuses your audience. The difficulty of retracting wrong information or correcting a social media misstep cannot be overstated. Once an inconsistency occurs, your brand has been diluted. While some circumstances are out of your brand's control, you can mitigate many mistakes by creating a brand style guide upfront.
Essentials to Include in a Brand Style Guide
Mission Statement
Your company mission should be clearly established for all to see. Everything your team creates should point back to your mission. Spell it out in your brand style guide for easy reference.
Brand Voice
Think about how you want your company to sound. Do you want to be professional, energetic, or witty? You make the call, but then you must ensure everyone is on the same page. This way, the person drafting content for your company website doesn't sound completely different from the person answering company emails, whose tone should match the person doing your social media work.
Logo and Company Name
Your brand style guide must define and show examples of logo and company name usage. Show how to use your logo and company name in various formats, such as color, black and white, transparent, and on different backgrounds. Include rules around placement, font, color, and size of any tagline used with your logo. Likewise, define what abbreviations are acceptable for your company name and when to use them. If your name requires specific capitalization, spell it out for your team so everyone is consistent.
Color Palette
Provide HEX and RGB values for each color in your palette, along with the Pantone specification. Your branding guidelines should also include recommended color combinations.
Typography
Define font families, sizes, kerning, line spacing, and colors for various types of content like headers, subheaders, text blocks, citations, quotes, or any other formatted text that might be used in your materials.
Layout
Define where and how elements are positioned on a page and how they relate to each other. Establish margins, padding, gutters, or grid patterns for the overall layout. Create examples illustrating the differences in pages or layout templates, such as landing pages, product pages, and emails.
Links and Buttons
Determine the styles and colors for all links and buttons within your brand style guide. Show examples and provide hex color codes for content links, sidebar links, submit buttons, form buttons, info buttons, or any other interactive element you may use.
Visual Hierarchy
Show how headers, images, titles, and text blocks should relate to each other on the page. Have examples that clearly define the visual hierarchy you want to achieve with your branding.
Graphics and Icons
Determine the type, size, dimensions, and styles for graphics and icons on your site. Maintain a library of approved graphics and icons ready for your team to use.
Photography and Imagery
Don't cheapen your brand by using mediocre stock art or inconsistent photographic styles. Define the specific style you want to use in your branding guidelines.
All soft focus?
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Real people or stock images?
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Finally, be sure you have the usage rights to all the images you put in your photo library.
Putting Your Brand Style Guide into Action
Having your comprehensive branding guide should make marketing more effective and fun. You've established the basics: logo, colors, and typography. A branded visual environment is about setting creative guidelines to stay on brand wherever you go. Your brand style guide provides the tools for everyday visuals while not limiting creative growth.
With your brand style guide, you are ready to curate your overall written, spoken, and visual brand footprint and stay on-brand at all times.
This guide informs everything from the photos you use to the icons on your website and the way you write and design email newsletters. Anything showcasing your brand in action will feature your strong voice and tone in the copy and a unique visual layout. Your brand should be instantly recognizable and stand out among your competitors.
Conclusion: A Consistent Brand Builds Trust
When you assemble all the pieces of your branding guidelines, the goal is consistency across all your marketing materials, including all media and platforms where you publish content.
Consistency is crucial when establishing a brand for your startup. Having a clear brand identity is worth the time you spend developing it. A well-defined brand style guide means that any employee or freelancer will be on the same page, understanding how to communicate visually and verbally with your market. This consistency, driven by your branding guidelines, will help your brand engage and generate trust with consumers.
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