A Brand Guide Can Save You Time and Money

We all know that consistency is essential to run a successful business. You consistently have to show up to stay top of mind, engage with your customers, so you understand their needs, and look at the market to find areas of needs.

Consistency is a big part of your branding efforts as well. A well-developed style guide is a roadmap that helps your business scale quicker and easier.

So what is a Brand Style Guide?

A brand style guide (also called brand book or brand guide) is a document explaining the design standards of your brand. It will make your in house team members and outside vendors' lives easier, helping communication, and giving a bulletproof framework to use in their work.

Why do you need a Brand Guide?

1. To save time and money

2. To Increase Your Brand Awareness

3. To Increase Your Brand Value

To save time and money

Having a nicely put together book your new employees and vendors can read will speed up the on-boarding process because it saves time you would spend on meetings explaining your business in-depth for better understanding.

To Increase Your Brand Awareness

It will help your marketing efforts as it creates consistency in your visuals and increases your brand awareness. When you consistently use the same colors, fonts, etc. it engraves in peoples' minds, and they will recognize your brand easier in the future.

To Increase Your Brand Value

A consistent and cohesive brand identity increases the perceived brand value as you come across more professional and reliable. Maintaining the quality and integrity of your brand creates trust in your new prospects and current customers.

What is in a Brand Style Guide?

• Logo Design

• Color Palette/Color Scheme

• Typography

• Imagery

Logo Design

Explaining the logo design concept, how your logo should look in different formats (lockups), which colors to use for your logo. Add minimum sizes and spacing to ensure maximum exposure of your brand at all times. It is also wise to include how NOT to use your logo to avoid stretching and inappropriate color combinations.

Color Palette/Color Scheme

Listing all of your brand colors for print and digital media to ensure color consistency across different mediums. I would suggest including a color hierarchy as well to show the usage percentage of each color (primary, secondary, tertiary, call-to-action).

Typography

Showing all your brand fonts and their usage purposes (title, headline, sub-heading, body copy)

Imagery

Displaying example images and photo filters/presets used for cohesive photography.

Other things that a brand style guide can include are:

1. Mission of the brand

2. Vision of the brand

3. Tone of the brand

To help you get started on yours, I put together a downloadable Brand Style Guide Example. Click the button below to grab your copy!

All in all, a Brand Style Guide is essential to take your brand to the next level. It allows easy communication among team members and outside vendors. It creates a consistent look that your prospects will notice and remember. But most importantly, it allows you to build trust aka the foundation of all business relationships.

And if you’re overwhelmed by any stage of the process, let’s chat about how to get through it.

download your Brand Style Guide Example

Fill out the form below to download your Example Brand Style Guide

This post was inspired by Forbes’ “Why Your Brand Needs A Real Style Guide” and Ruby Porter’s “5 Reasons Why Brand Guidelines Are Important”, which I also highly recommend to read.