Let’s Talk Style ….Guides!

What is this important document and why you need one.

Want a great way to ensure brand cohesion across multiple marketing platforms to ensure your customers have the same great experience with your brand every time?
The answer lies in a Style guide aka Brand Bible, Brand Manual or Brand Guidelines.

A Style Guide simply put, it’s a set of rules for writing and design. It’s a document that provides guidelines for the way your brand should be represented from both a graphic and language perspective in marketing, advertising & print.

The purpose of a style guide is to make sure that agency’s or businesses working with your brand, represent it in a clear and cohesive way that reflects your brand style and ensures brand consistency is maintained across all marketing platforms.

A good Graphic Designer will usually include elements for your brand in the overall layout of the Style Guide, thus strengthening your brand style even more.

Brand Consistency
Consistent branding allows businesses to differentiate their product or services, delivering key messages to their customers. If we think of popular brand such as Coco Cola or Mac Donalds, their brand colours, marketing messages and feelings that their products give you are clearly defined. The important purpose of a Style Guide is to ensure consistency across all written communications produced by or for your business.

What a Style Guide Outlines:
• Your logo suite & brand kit
• Your colour palette & type
• Photography & Image use
• Social media or ebook templates
• Your brand vision
• Your website

These are just a few of the things a Style Guide will outline. Being an organic document a Style Guide will grow as your business does. Any additions to your branding such as uniforms, packaging or printed materials should be added to your style guide.

Set the tone for your business
Establishing a voice for any brand is important. Are you casual, friendly, and direct or more informal and informative? You want to ensure the same voice is carried throughout your brand.

Cut down the work & avoid mistakes for Editors, Graphic Designers or anyone else working with
your brand.
A Style Guide can save valuable time for the person designing or proofreading a piece of writing before it’s published. This means they can edit as they go, rather than having to cross-reference different parts of a webpage or report to establish style rules, like the correct title of a product. This saves your business time (and therefore, money).

Having your logo set to the edge of your flyer or any other printed materials is not idea. The logo placement page mentions the clear space that needs to be around your logo when using it on printed or digital publications. It also mentions the minimum size your logo is to be used at.

Conclusion
A style guide is essential to keep your brand identity consistent, recognizable, and ownable, as several different people may develop content for your brand. Since a Style Guide defines the guidelines for maintaining a brand’s identity, it’s important to spend the time and resources to get it right.

Banish BORING and attract your ideal client with captivating branding & design that converts leads to sales with ease!