Craft Brand Style Guidelines for Lasting Impact

 Tuesday, December 27, 2022

Craft Brand Style Guidelines for Lasting Impact

Imagine — your coworker who wears tailored suits every day shows up in ripped jeans, a baggy sweatshirt, and messy hair. 

How would you react? You’ll probably be confused. Even shocked and worried. You may even ask him if everything is all right. 

Why? 

It’s because your colleague is acting out of his usual behavior. 

The same logic applies to your brand. Users perceive every brand within a personality, and if your brand acts out of character, they’ll have difficulty trusting it. 

Creating a branding style guide solves this issue.  

In this blog, let’s understand brand identity guidelines and brand style guide examples. 

What is a Branding Style Guide? 

A branding style guide is a holistic rulebook that defines your company's branding. It includes a set of brand identity guidelines that define its grammar, tone, logo usage, colors, visuals, word usage, point of view, and more.  

It helps maintain consistency in what a brand looks, feels, and sounds like in all your content, from blog posts and presentations to office spaces and business cards. 

Create Your Brand Style Guide in 5 Ways 

Start With a Brand Story 

A brand story defines a company’s vision, mission, and core values, describing what your business cares about most. You can use it to communicate your business values to the audience and even refer to it for business-related decisions. 

Look at Skype’s brand guide example - a creative, playful, casual brand story. 

Speech bubbles with the words'our mission'.

Create a Signature Logo 

A well-designed logo is an identification point; customers use it to recognize your brand, establishing a visual connection and a recall value of your brand name.  

Once you decide on the logo's design, color, and size, think about how it would look in different environments.  

Design Your Brand’s Color Palette 

Your brand colors express a lot about your branding, so try to understand color psychology and strategize your brand’s color palette accordingly. 

Also, decide on specific color combinations you want all your visual elements to be in. Be specific about hex codes, RGB values, and CMYK color codes. Like how Netflix does its white font, red logo, and black background.  

Choose Specific Typography 

Don’t let typography slip under your radar — decide if you want one typeface family to represent all your font needs or choose multiple fonts.  

Also, outline the font type for different purposes. Remember to define font sizes (big for headers, medium for subheaders, and smaller for paragraphs) and font weights (light, bold, heavy) 

Know Your Brand Voice 

Find a writing style that resonates with your audience and aligns with your brand personality. Think about whether you want to be professional or casual. Do you want the audience to see you as powerful, friendly, and approachable? 

Take Coca Cola for example - positive, friendly, and down-to-earth. 

Coca cola's website with a red bottle on it.

You can make the brand voice known to everyone on the team by including grammar, punctuation, spelling, vocabulary, naming, and tone guidelines. 

A branding style guide is a powerful tool, so much so that some businesses even call it a brand bible. So plan it carefully. 

If you need help, contact Walibu — our brand marketers can help you devise the perfect brand style guide so that you can confidently represent your brand. 


Author

Ben Paulsen
Ben Paulsen
Ben Paulsen is a veteran Digital Marketing Expert, and founder of Walibu, a Digital Marketing Agency founded in 2007. Walibu has a unique advantage over other digital marketing agencies with their proprietary marketing platform. Walibu is all encompassing agency delivering top tier services and results in all aspects of marketing.

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Ben Paulsen