Your organization presents itself in a certain way to the world. In other words, how does the world view your business? Did you know that your company’s logo and color selections, speak volumes to your target customers?
A brand style guide helps keep the consistency of the look, sound, and feel of your brand. Brand style guidelines represent your business’ personality. You tend to gravitate to people if you like their personality, right?
In the same way, people will treat your company’s personality according to the way they see it. But some people keep changing their nature, and for that reason, you can’t trust them. Your brand should have a specific identity for the people to believe it. Therefore, you should create a consistent brand style guideline.
Steps to Creating a Style Guide for Your Brand
1. Gather brand guide inspiration
A picture will speak volumes about your company. To achieve this, you should collect various style guides for different brands and determine what has worked for your brand in the past. Collect examples of emails, ads, mailers, and different marketing mediums. Also, get to know what you like about other brands.
You can get these brands from storybrand website examples. Furthermore, get to know what questions come up repeatedly and check the feedback. Such information will help you understand how your brand should feel and look.
2. Define the 6 essential brand guide elements
After gathering the inspiration, you can now begin working with your designer. Selecting a designer is very critical, to give you a hint, choose the one you feel comfortable being around with and who can easily understand your business goals.
Also, the designer should have excellent communication skills. The designer may come up with new ideas or change yours, but there are six essential elements to focus on that would keep both in tune with the best approaches to achieve your target.
These are the brand story, logo, voice, color palette, typography, and imagery. In case you get stuck, start by putting everything together and check storybrand website examples to get an idea.
3. Brand collateral list for your guide
You may decide to go further than the six essential elements. For instance, if your brand is digital, then codify your image layout design on your website.
If you do sell physical products, then you’ll require packaging guidelines. These guidelines should direct users on when to use the company name and when to use the product’s name.
4. Outline your guide
In this step, pick your six essential elements and put them together with your business goals, and then create an outline. It will help you know the right structure for your guide.
5. Evolution of your brand
You can modify the different advertising mediums as you wish and your designer will be of much help to you. That’s why you should hire a qualified and experienced one.
Conclusion
Now you know how to create a style guideline for your brand. Ensure that you use the 6 essential elements. Also, revisit it periodically.
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