Brand guidelines communicate your brand’s identity, assets, and what it stands for. These guidelines can be broadly classified into two types: your brand identity, which contains guidelines on your company’s vision, mission, core values, and brand tone, and your brand assets, which include your logo, color palette for visual designs, font families, and other visual standards.
Setting up a brand style guide is necessary not only for your internal communication but also to ensure consistent messaging with your partners, affiliates, and customers. Here are five questions to help you understand how a brand style guide can help improve your business.
1. What is a brand style guideline?
A style guideline is a collection of branding standards or rules on how the company presents itself to the market through its logo, font choices, and color palette.
2. Why is this important?
Branding guidelines should help create a unified identity for your business so you can stand out from your competitors and other businesses in your industry. Here are a few compelling reasons to have a brand guideline:
3. What does a brand guide usually contain?
Color palette: This should dictate the combination of colors used in your brand designs. Your color palette guide should contain the RGB and CMYK color codes to be used for your designs and other collateral.
Logo: This should address how your logo can be placed on different backgrounds, size restrictions, different formats, and color combinations.
Typography: This should show which font families, font sizes, and font hierarchy your brand uses.
Imagery: These standards should include the style of photographs, wordmarks, or icons your company uses on your website and marketing materials.
Value, Vision and Mission: These should showcase what your brand stands for, as well as general communication tone, and brand personality.
4. How does it benefit your brand?
Branding isn’t only about creating impressive visuals, but also should send compelling messages about the identity of your company.
Your brand style guidelines support your marketing initiatives by ensuring your messaging is consistent with brand standards. This helps build brand equity, which makes your brand more recognizable in the market and contributes to audience awareness. Creating a brand style guide will also help show your business is well-established and will even help you update your brand in the future based on the expansion and needs of the industry.
5. When do you need a brand guide?
Create your brand guidelines when you’re starting a business or during the early stages of establishing it. Creating a brand style guide is crucial, regardless of your industry, size of your business, and the market you’re catering to. This is also necessary to guide the new members of your organization in familiarizing themselves with your brand.
To quickly power your brand from recognition to top-of-mind awareness, you need to have strong brand guidelines in place.
Looking to create brand style guidelines for your business?
Download the Show style guide template
Access our growing library of presentation templates and themes from Show now. Download the app for free – iOS and Android
Comments