When you create your style guide online, it helps the overall collaboration of your brand much better. For instance, if there are different owners or you have business partners who get a say about your brand’s style, then using these easy-to-edit-and-collaborate cloud services is the way to go. Branding guidelines specify how your brand will be represented —visually, tonally, and verbally. They usually take the form of a digital or print packet or presentation. Branding guidelines may also be known as a brand guide, style guide, or brand book. Creating a style guide with consistent brand elements allows you to differentiate your product, deliver memorable messaging, and build brand recognition and customer loyalty. Why you need a style guide for your brand. Without a style guide for your brand, you’re much more likely to appear unprofessional, unorganized, and lacking a clear vision.
Maintaining consistency is vital to a brand’s success. However, if you have several people involved in creating and maintaining your website, and they aren’t on the same page when it comes to how to portray your brand, consistency becomes difficult to achieve.
A style guide can provide your team with the tools to better maintain your brand’s image, and give your site’s users a dependable experience. In other words, by establishing clearer and more efficient communication across your team, style guides improve the experience of your brand for both the people creating it and those encountering it.
In this article, we’ll discuss what a brand style guide is and why it’s essential to your website. Then we’ll explain how to create one for your site in just five steps. Let’s get going!
An Introduction to Brand Style Guides
A brand style guide is a set of rules for how your brand will be portrayed, both online and off. Think of it as the foundation of your brand story. This includes its web design, tone, and content, the way you handle customer interactions, and more. Businesses are built on customers’ perceptions, so anything that impacts how your site’s audience sees your brand can be taken into account.
Some specific areas of interest for your style guide might include visual design elements and choices such as color scheme, iconography and typography, site layout, images, and logos (including your marketing materials). Your web copy, ‘about’ page, blog, and social media content should also match your brand personality in the eyes of users.
Any elements related to user interactions, including live chats and forms, also make an impact on how customers feel about your brand. How quickly you respond, what you say, and how you say it can turn a lead into a promoter for your brand. When done poorly, it can also lead them towards your competition instead.
It’s important to note that a style guide, or brand book, is different from a pattern library. While pattern libraries are also useful, they only list the essential elements of your brand’s visual identity. They don’t provide any direction as to how those elements should be used. For example, without a style guide, your team may have a copy of your logo at hand, but they won’t know what to do with it.
Why a Brand Style Guide Is Crucial to Your Website
How To Create A Website Style Guide
Having a brand style guide for your website keeps all team members on the same page about how to present your content to the world. It’s also helpful if you have to hire outside designers or developers to work on your site, as it can prevent them from taking off with their own ideas and leaving your site looking disjointed.
Consistency is key to a brand’s success. Users will more quickly recognize your brand if you have a distinct style that you use everywhere. What’s more, if all aspects of your brand’s identity aren’t the same across your website, social media platforms, and anywhere else it appears, users may become confused and wonder if it’s all really part of the same brand.
Implementing a thorough brand style guide as soon as you bring in new team members (or even freelancers, such as graphic designer or web developer) will set the standard for consistency right out of the gate. The more consistent you can be, the faster you’ll be able to start building your brand identity and acquiring repeat users.
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How to Create a Brand Style Guide for Your Website (5 Key Steps)
There are several factors to consider when creating your brand style guide. Most importantly, building it around your vision for your brand will enable you to craft brand guidelines that help you achieve your goals. Let’s talk about how that process works.
Step 1: Decide Where Your Style Guide Will ‘Live’
Style guides can be created in a variety of formats. Where your guidelines will reside is up to you, but remember that a style guide is most useful when it clearly communicates your requirements and is easily accessible to anyone who needs to use it.
Some businesses create subdomains for their websites that specify page layout, image and logo placement, font, and more. The advantage of using a subdomain is that it’s a visual representation of your style, instead of just a bulleted list of rules. Anyone using your guide will see precisely what the content they’re creating should look like.
Alternatively, project management tools such as Trello are also a useful option. They’re made to be used by teams, so it’s easy to share your guide with anyone who might need it. This kind of tool also makes it simple to organize information in a way that provides clear direction to the people working on your brand.
Of course, if you just need a quick and painless way to create a branding style guide, there’s nothing wrong with writing it up as a document. Including images with examples can help to clarify any complex points. Just make sure the file is easy to share, as you’ll have to make it accessible to everyone who creates content related to your brand.
Step 2: Clarify Your Brand’s Mission
You may have an idea of what you want to accomplish with your website, but writing out a clear and firmly-established mission statement is still important. It will be a useful reminder for yourself, and make it easier to communicate your goals to other people working on your brand.
When creating your mission statement, make sure to focus on your brand’s purpose, and be specific about your values and what you hope to accomplish. You’ll want to communicate your big-picture goals, while also providing concrete examples that are easy for people to remember.
Step 3: Define Your Brand’s Tone and Voice
Your brand’s ‘tone’ is the overall feeling it conveys to your target audience, while its ‘voice’ is its specific personality. Tone can be easily communicated through images and written content. Voice will also come across in written content, and in interactions with users.
Your brand’s tone and voice often define how users interact with your content, and what emotions it evokes in them. Using the same style consistently helps users get to know your business ‘personally.’ Just as a person who is joking around one minute and angry the next can be off-putting, sudden shifts in tone and voice will likely confuse your users.
Incorporating tone and voice into your style guide can be tricky. However, you can start by listing qualities you want your content to express, and emotions you’d like it to trigger. It’s also smart to use your brand’s tone and voice to create the guide itself. If you’re going for a relaxed and welcoming vibe, for example, throw in a few emojis or some slang. On the other hand, more formal brands will want to present their guidelines in a straightforward manner.
Step 4: Determine Guidelines for Your Brand’s Visual Elements
In your style guide, you’ll also want to include specifications on your logo’s usage. This includes when and where it will be displayed. If you always want your logo to be set as the thumbnail for blog posts, for example, you would want to mention this in your style guide (so everyone who works on blog content will know what to do).
Similarly, setting rules about what kinds of images will be allowed can help you maintain brand consistency across your site. For example, you may want to specify whether memes are appropriate for use in blog posts, or if they’re too casual for your brand’s tone. Mentioning licensing requirements in order to avoid copyright infringement would also be wise.
Creating a clear list of all the brand colors, typefaces, icons, and layouts you want to use for your site will ensure that the people working on your brand know these specifications exist. It will prevent them from imposing their own preferences and help those with good intentions avoid mistakes, such as using a color palette that’s just a few shades off from your logo.
Step 5: Allow Your Style Guide to Evolve With Your Brand
As your brand grows and changes, your style guide will probably need to do the same. Feedback from users, changes in industry standards, and modifications to your mission statement might mean you’ll want to modify your tone or certain visual elements.
It’s far more effective to let your style adapt with your brand than to cling to your old guidelines and end up with a style that doesn’t match your current goals. Remember, users’ perceptions can make or break your brand. If they find your style confusing or inconsistent with your brand’s message, they’re more likely to have a negative reaction (or to simply not remember you).
Any time you make updates to your brand bible, be sure to alert everyone working on your site right away. People get used to doing things a certain way, so they may overlook your changes if they aren’t pointed out directly.
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Branding Matters
Inconsistency across a website’s brand often leads to confusion for your users and your team members. Creating a style guide can help everyone working on your site understand exactly what it should look, sound, and feel like, so your visitors can have a positive experience.
Do you have any questions about using or creating this type of style guide? Follow us on Twitter and let’s discuss!
Image credits: Netflix, I Heart NY, Urban Outfitters, Spotify, DreamHost.
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Creating a style guide for your brand is essential to ensuring a smooth, deliberate, clear, and intentional message in your marketing and brand representation. Knowing how to create a style guide for your brand is a valuable skill—one you can use as an entrepreneur or in service of a corporation of any size. A successful style guide tells internal employees how to create messaging reflective of your brand and takes into account the recipient of those messages.
What Is a Style Guide?
A style guide is a central document that defines, exemplifies, and executes a brand’s voice. Style guides define language preferences and tones as well as direct an organization’s representatives to use the brand’s style in specific ways, for specific outlets. The style guide may include details about:
- Which major styles to use (AP Style, Chicago, MLA)
- Oxford comma usage
- Tone or formality of language
- Fonts, typography, and colors associated with the brand
- Information about the audience your brand reaches.
It may also include assets such as your logo in a number of formats and a black and white version.
How to Create a Style Guide for Your Brand
When it comes to understanding how to create a style guide for your brand, it’s best to break up a potentially large project into pieces. Divide, delegate, conquer, and publicize (internally) with these steps and stages.
Understand Your Buyer Persona
As your brand, who are you trying to reach? You should consider choosing the language and other stylistic elements partially based upon your prospective and current customers. Your buyer persona can help you understand what type of language you should use to reach your ideal audience.
A buyer persona is basically a profile of your ideal customer, and it’s an essential component of understanding your brand. Here’s an example of a buyer persona for a company that produces high-end coffee machines.
Name: Kathy Sample
Gender: Female
Profession: C-suite executive
Generation: Millennial
Age: 33
Income: $115,000/year
Marital Status: Domestic partnership, no children
Education: Masters degree, Business (MBA)
Religion: Christian
Affinities and biographical information: Kathy is a busy working professional living in an urban environment, likely a loft apartment or condominium, with her partner. She doesn’t own a car, but rents one for long trips. When it comes to brewing coffee, she prefers speed, convenience, and quality, while the cost is not a large concern for her. Kathy enjoys coffee in the morning at home when she wakes up and mid-day at the office. She drinks top-shelf liquor and dines out in the evenings on the weekend. She usually brings pre-planned meals to work or dines out with coworkers at lunch. While Kathy experiences generational tension with her parents, she finds that they can often discuss life over a cup of coffee, and considers it a central bonding experience when spending time with her loved ones.
From this information, we can extrapolate that Kathy might best receive advertising messages during her workday, perhaps when she’s craving a cup of coffee. If she’s thinking about her family, she might want a warmer message, possibly a seasonal one during Christmas.
Adhere to Document Creation Processes
Does your organization already have structures in place for creating documentation? Many businesses adhere to an Agile model, which means you’ll need to plan and allocate time and resources in a structured fashion. This means choosing a deadline, delegating relevant pieces of the style guide creation, ensuring in-house distribution, and in many cases, proving ROI (return on investment) for this piece of content.
If there are already document creation procedures, find out what they are and plan your process.
Seek Input
When it comes to defining your brand, the first step involves evaluating and defining the voice of your brand. To accomplish this, you’ll need measured input from your team. Identify key stakeholders and ensure they contribute to this definition. You can do this through:
- A series of meetings
- An electronic survey
- Compilation of existing documents
In a large organization, consider asking department heads to brainstorm with their individual groups and provide one sheet of feedback per department. Make sure to always provide a deadline.
Once you’ve collected input, identify any trends and consider whether they reflect your brand.
Design Your Brand’s Style Guide
Your brand’s style guide is primarily a document of text defining the limits and expressions of your brand. Naturally, you’ll want to layout your document in an exemplary fashion: your document should exemplify any rules you have for your brand’s style.
You may wish to seek help with the layout of this document, depending on its size, or you may wish to collaborate with a designer to create a complete brand book. Brand books include heavy visual elements and guidelines for using visual imagery along with your brand’s style guide.
You can also use tools such as Frontify or Canva to design it and make it easier to update over time.
Publish In-House in a Shared or Accessible Location
Your style guide is only as good as its ability for others to use it. Once your style guide is complete and published, you’ll need to determine:
- How you will distribute the style guide
- Where you will house it (shared internal location is the best bet)
- How and when you will remind people to use it
- Remain a point of contact for employees who have questions about using the style guide
Update Existing Materials
Your website, printed marketing collateral, and other messaging may need updates to comply with the style guide. Create a defined schedule for reviewing and updating your marketing materials to ensure they comply with your new style guide.
Update Your Style Guide
Culture changes, both generally and within your organization. Organizations rebrand, relaunch, and go in new directions to survive. As that happens, you’ll need a plan to update your style guide to suit. This means providing a schedule for review (I suggest a quarterly review) as well as a means for others to provide feedback and updates.
How To Create A Website Style Guide That Builds Your Brand Quiz
Ultimately, knowing how to create a style guide for your brand is all about expressing your brand clearly and encouraging the desired response from your ideal customer or business partner. The presence of a style guide can also create clear direction within your organization and provide a means for you to have agency and advocacy within your brand.