Brand Style Guide Essentials: Create a Stunning Brand Identity

Have you heard of a brand style guide?

A brand style guide that lets everyone - both inside and outside of your organisation - know what your brand is all about and how you want your brand to look. It includes everything from the story of your brand’s history to the nitty-gritty details about logo designs, it's all in there!

What do you need to think about before creating your brand style guide?

Before you dive into creating your style guide, you need to deeply understand your brand to begin with.

Your brand is not just a website, logo or a few photos. All of those things are part of your brand, but they only make up part of it. The heart of your brand should be how people think and feel about your company and what makes it stand out from your competitors.

When outlining your brand, consider these key elements:

• Your mission/vision statement:

  What’s the big purpose behind your company? What do you do? What makes it different? What do you want to achieve on a grand scale?

• Your target audience:

  Who are the people you are helping and, more importantly, what problems are you solving for them?

• Your values:

  What words or actions represent your company? Knowing this is helpful not just for creating, but for hiring as well.

What should you include in your style guide?

Now, it’s time to move on to the different sections of your brand style guide and what it should contain. It should be as user-friendly as possible for everyone, whether they're part of your team or collaborating as third-party designers.

Here's the lineup of our top brand style guide essentials:

Table of Contents

This may seem obvious, but it’s still important. Your Table of Contents is what makes this document navigable.

The Brand Story

This is where the magic happens. You get to tell the tale of your brand's mission, target audience, and values. The goal is to give the reader gets a sense of what your company’s all about.

Need help getting started? Read our Tips for Getting Started with Branding

Logo Guide

Okay, let’s get technical. Depending on the size of your organisation, employees are going to use the logo frequently. You’ll want to make sure that when the logo is used, it’s never stretched or awkwardly placed. By providing specifications for logo sizes and variations, you’ll be able to ensure that your brand’s logo is always used correctly.

Colour Guide

What are your company colours? Is there a specific colour that you use for backgrounds? Or text? By putting all this colour information in the style guide, you’ll ensure everything is kept consistent across your websites, brochures, and more.

Typeface Guide

Pick a few different fonts for your brand and choose what purpose each font is for. One may be for headers while others are for the body text of sales letters. It's all about finding the perfect match for your brand personality.

Digital Guidelines

How do you want blog posts uploaded to your website to look? Or maybe, you want your tweets to be formatted a certain way?

This is the section where you can include these kinds of details. Remember not to limit yourself to one digital area. Don’t forget things like website layouts, email signatures, social media channels, and more.

Print Guidelines

This section is similar to the digital guidelines but focuses on things like physical letters, branded invoices, and stationery. This section may overlap with your digital guidelines, for example, if you send invoices via PDF.

Physical Guidelines

If your company sells physical products that are shipped out to customers, then you’ll want to include this section in your brand guidelines.

When someone orders a product from your website, they expect a good brand experience when they receive their package. It’s not enough to wrap a product in brown paper and ship it off. You should include your branding guidelines in this section so that customers have a positive experience with your brand when they receive shipped items or promotional items.

What Next?

That’s it, you’ve completed your brand style guide

Well, not quite… your brand style guide is never really finished, it’s a living document. Over time, your brand will evolve and your style guide should evolve with it.

Of course, you shouldn’t change it too often (since that defeats the purpose of a guide) but keep note of feedback from employees and external team members and any ideas that pop into your head. This way when the time comes for a brand revamp, you’re off to a running start.

Need some help?

Look no further! At Finch Design Company, we love helping businesses craft and establish a distinctive brand identity. Our dedicated team takes the time to understand what makes your brand unique. Once we understand your vision, we'll create a comprehensive style guide tailored to your needs.

If you're curious to learn more about how we can help you, let's chat. Drop us a message today!