Ever wondered if you need a brand style guide? Guest blogger, Rebecca Turpie, shares her insights into how you can maintain a memorable brand presence for your business using a Style Guide.
Branding is more than just flashing your company logo around. Branding is a continuous and interwoven process of applying your company’s “essence” at every opportunity. This enables your existing customers to more easily recognise you, and entices new customers to try you.
A whole range of different elements make up your branding, including your logo, colours, typeface (fonts), tag lines or slogans, product packaging, marketing collateral, business stationery, signage, website, social media, advertising, point of sale/merchandising, customer service language, employee presentation and more. By creating cohesiveness throughout all of these elements, your customers will develop better brand recall and trust in your business. And prospective customers can more quickly identify if your business is the right choice for them.
So, how can a simple document help you ace your company’s brand presence? In one word: CONSISTENCY! By adhering to all of the elements in your style guide, you will easily keep your marketing presence on-brand.
A style guide is a branding manual and can be anything from a single page of information to a full booklet. The absolute must-haves of a style guide include your company fonts and colour palette. More comprehensive guides also include other valuable information, including:
- Your brand story, including your vision, mission and values
- Logo size, placement and where alternate logo options can be used
- Design standards, such as visual hierarchy, standard styling and design elements
- Typographical guidelines, such as heading sizes, text alignment and letter kerning
- Image usage, such as where to source images and what styles are permitted
- Language standards, such as tag lines and terminology
- Don’ts – it’s also important to define what shouldn’t be done with your branding!
If you don’t already have a style guide in your business, now is the time to develop one! Check out these links for some inspiration on what to include in your style guide.
Skype Brandbook | Branding – Dropbox | Styleguide (yelp.com) | Hootsuite Brand Guidelines
About the author
Rebecca Turpie is the owner of Everley Design Boutique. She has been specialising in small business graphic design for the past 11 years. Her background in marketing and print advertising enables her to deliver a well-rounded design service that elevates her clients’ branding and market presence. Rebecca can be found over at www.everleydesignboutique.com.au