Creating a branding style guide is like crafting the playbook for your brand’s visual and verbal identity. It’s your brand’s DNA, a comprehensive document that ensures consistency across all forms of communication. Generally, a branding style guide is part of a business’s overall brand strategy and helps ensure outward messaging is consistent no matter who creates the content.
Whether you’re a startup or an established business, a solid branding style guide can help maintain a unified voice and aesthetic across departments. Here, we provide a guide for your business on how to create an effective branding style guide, helping to inform your business decisions and marketing strategies in the years to come.
Table of Contents
What is a brand strategy?
What is a brand style guide, and why is it important?
Step-by-step guide to writing a branding style guide
Final thoughts
What is a brand strategy?
A brand strategy is the blueprint for creating a unique, consistent brand identity. It sets the foundation for all your marketing efforts and consumer interactions. It also helps to ensure your brand is identifiable so you become the go-to choice in your business niche.
What is a brand style guide, and why is it important?
A branding guide is a physical document that includes information about the brand voice and tone and your logo, brand color palette, fonts, and graphics styles to use.
According to a 2020 survey by Lucidpress, consistent branding can increase revenue by 33%. This consistency begins with a well-defined brand identity, which your style guide will encapsulate.
A brand style guide is a crucial tool for ensuring consistency, building brand recognition, streamlining communication, saving time and resources, supporting brand values and mission, enhancing marketing efforts, and adapting to growth.
Consistency is vital for any brand, and a style guide provides the necessary specifications for visual and verbal elements, ensuring a cohesive look and tone across all platforms. This uniformity helps in creating a recognizable identity, where customers associate specific colors, fonts, and logos with your brand. Trust is also built through consistent experiences, as customers are more likely to remember and rely on a brand that consistently delivers a unified message.
Internally, a style guide aligns everyone in the organization, from marketing teams to customer service representatives, providing a reference for how the brand should be represented. Externally, it aids collaboration with partners like designers and agencies, reducing misunderstandings and ensuring that the output matches the brand’s identity. This streamlining of communication not only saves time but also prevents costly inconsistencies and rework.
A style guide also clearly articulates the brand’s core values and mission, serving as a constant reminder of what the brand stands for and ensuring that all brand-related activities align with its purpose and goals. This clarity supports effective marketing campaigns, as consistent branding makes marketing materials more engaging and memorable, differentiating the brand from competitors.
Step-by-step guide to writing a branding style guide
Step 1: Understand your brand
Before you start drafting your style guide, it’s crucial to have a deep understanding of your brand. It can be helpful to start by building your branding guide and developing this style guide as a piece of the branding guide. If you don’t already have a branding guide, read more about the process here.
To develop a deeper of your brand, consider asking yourself the following questions:
- What are its values and beliefs?
- What is its mission and vision?
- What tone and personality does it have?
Step 2: Create your visual identity
Visual identity will usually be what consumers first notice about your brand. Consistent visuals across platforms can help promote fast brand recognition.
Components of visual identity:
- Logo: Create a logo that is simple, recognizable, and aligns with your brand. Allow for scalability (it should look good in a number of sizes). Include variations (e.g. black and white, color, horizontal, vertical) and on different backgrounds that work in a variety of contexts. Consider including guidelines for usage.
- Color Palette: Specify primary and secondary colors with hex codes. Generally, brands choose 2-3 main colors.
- Typography: Choose fonts for headings, body text, and accents
- Imagery: Define the style of images and illustrations (e.g., realistic photos, abstract illustrations). Provide examples in your style guide to help team members choose the right imagery that aligns with the brand.
What to consider when making decisions about your brand’s visual identity
- Brand personality: Your visual identity should reflect your brand’s personality. Are you fun and playful or serious and professional? Your design choices should communicate this clearly.
- Target audience: Consider the preferences and expectations of your target audience. Different demographics respond to different visual cues, so align your visual identity with what resonates with them.
- Competitive landscape: Analyze your competitors’ visual identities. You want to stand out while still fitting within your industry’s standards.
- Versatility: Ensure that your visual elements are versatile enough to work across various mediums and formats, from digital to print
- Simplicity: Simplicity aids recognition. Overly complex designs can be difficult to reproduce and might not be as memorable.
You may also want to gather feedback from stakeholders and, if possible, test your visual elements with a segment of your target audience before finalizing them.
Step 3: Develop your verbal identity
Verbal identity encompasses your brand’s tone, voice, and messaging. It dictates how your brand communicates with its audience. According to a study by Sprout Social, 40% of consumers say they feel a stronger connection to a brand when they recognize its personality. A consistent verbal identity helps build this connection.
Your brand voice is the unique personality of your brand in all communications. It should be consistent and reflect your brand’s core identity.
- Personality traits: Decide on the key traits that describe your brand. Are you friendly, professional, humorous, or authoritative?
- Tone: While voice remains consistent, tone can change depending on the context and audience. Define how your tone should vary in different situations (e.g., casual on social media, formal in reports).
- Language and style: Specify the type of language you use. Are you formal or informal? Do you use industry jargon or keep it simple?
Step 4: Establish communication guidelines
Your branding style guide should include specific guidelines for how your brand will communicate with the audience. This often includes grammar guidelines, word usage rules, and formatting essentials. Consider words or phrases that are branded phrases (like, “Have a break, have a KitKat”) or phrases that are often troublesome and want to create consistency (like ecommerce vs. e-commerce).
You may also want to outline topics or words you want your brand to avoid using.
These guidelines could include:
- Grammar and punctuation: Specify rules for grammar, punctuation, and spelling
- Style preferences: Outline preferences for things like capitalization, abbreviations, and numerals
- Do’s and don’ts: Provide examples of language and phrases that are in line with your brand, as well as those to avoid
Step 5: Provide examples and templates
Include real-world examples and templates to illustrate how to apply the guidelines. This makes it easier for everyone to understand and follow the style guide. You may also want to include examples of high-performing posts.
- Social media post template: Includes placeholder text and image guidelines
- Blog post template: Outlines heading styles, font usage, and tone
- Brochure template: Demonstrates layout, color usage, and logo placement
Final thoughts
Creating an effective branding style guide is essential for maintaining consistency and building a strong brand identity. By understanding your brand, defining core elements, developing visual and verbal identities, establishing guidelines for different media, providing examples, and regularly updating the guide, you can ensure your brand stands out and resonates with your audience.
Start crafting your branding style guide today, and watch as your brand begins to flourish!
