When it comes to building your brand, the perfect logo design will provide a valuable advantage. However, the most successful businesses go a step farther than logo design. They create a seamless presence to engage consumers across all mediums. An effective style guide is essential to establishing that consistent brand image.

So what is a Style Guide?

A style guide, typically constructed by a designer and business owner or manager, is a special document that lays out specific, clear guidelines for the presentation of a brand. It promotes consistency by defining rules regarding unique visual and language styles for your complete brand image. Style guides typically include distinct elements such as typefaces, vocabulary, colours, image characteristics, tone, document preferences and more.

Developing Your Brand Style Guide

The creation of your brand style guide is a complex process that should be organised and managed by a design professional. Even if you already have a great logo that you think represents your brand perfectly, there are many other important decisions to be made on everything from font, language and colour to tone, overall message and more.

Selecting Colours

Most businesses use between two and four primary colours across all company representations to promote consistency in the brand image. A professional designer’s experience with colour theory and application is invaluable during this process. Each colour should be carefully selected to create the exact emotional response your brand intends to portray. Once selected, these exact colours should be used across all of your webpages, print designs, letterheads and advertisements. Most designers ensure this exact colour match by noting the 6-digit hex code for every selected colour.

Typography

Although it may be necessary to use more than one font to portray your brand across all mediums, very few companies really need more than three font selections. The typography you choose should be versatile so that it can be easily implemented into logos, webpages, print designs and more. Professional designers may create font styles unique to your brand to help it stand out among the competition.

Tone

When all of your brand’s design elements and other content are combined, they should depict one consistent tone geared towards your intended audience. Whether your brand embodies a fun, energetic spirit with playful and upbeat tones or a more serious and authoritative tone works best, your writers and designers should be on the same page when creating content. Tone inconsistencies can be very damaging to the potential power of your brand.

Although there are hundreds of other considerations to be made while developing a style guide for your brand, understanding the feelings and needs of your target customers is paramount to the entire process. Once you understand your customers and learn how to communicate the key information effectively, your designer can help you build the perfect brand image for reaching those customers. A brand style guide is equally important for businesses with a heavy focus on online presence and for companies who work mostly through print and other mediums. The style guide is the “rulebook” that keeps everyone involved with your company maintain the valuable brand image you have created.