Brand Style Guides: The What, the Why, and the How

Let's play a game. How many of the following brands can you recognize going only on basic descriptions?

A German sports brand that features three stripes on their shoes, usually in white. A Danish toy company with white block lettering on a red background. How about a Swedish furniture manufacturer with yellow block lettering on a blue background? Or maybe an American fast food chain featuring yellow arches, a bright red, and a para-pa-pa-pam?

If you guessed Adidas, LEGO, IKEA, and McDonald's, you win. But before you close the tab and go on with your day, ask yourself one thing: What makes these brands so easily recognizable? More importantly, how can you make your own brand as memorable to your clients?

It’s not just about a logo or a catchy jingle. It’s about creating a cohesive brand identity that tells your story, connects with your audience, and stands out in the crowd. And this is right where a well-crafted style guide enters the stage.

What we'll cover

1. What a style guide is

2. 3 types of style guides

3. Why you need a style guide

4. How to create a brand style guide

   1. Visual style guide

   2. Editorial style guide

What is a style guide?

In essence, a style guide is a user manual for your brand. It sets the standards for design, writing, and formatting with the goal of maintaining brand consistency across channels.

3 common types of style guides

Style guides come in different forms depending on the aspects of brand communication. Since visuals are usually what comes to mind first when thinking about style, we'll start there.

A visual style guide defines the rules for visual elements that go into your brand identity. It includes guidelines for logo usage, defines the color palette, and sets the rules on typography. Additionally, visual style guides can also cover imagery guidelines to make sure visual elements such as photography or iconography align with the brand's aesthetic.

In addition to your brand's look, there's also the matter of how it sounds, which is a job for an editorial style guide. An editorial style guide focuses on maintaining consistency and clarity in written content. It establishes standards for grammar, punctuation, spelling, and style preferences. Additionally, it defines your brand’s tone of voice, ensuring that all written communications reflect a unified personality and effectively convey your brand’s message.

And if you want to have both, but feel like two separate brand guideline documents are a bit of an overkill, there's the combined style guide. A combined style guide consists of your visual and editorial guidelines, all in one document.

Why would you need your own style guide?

Now that you know what a style guide is and what elements of your brand go into it, you might be wondering whether you need one. If a strong brand identity is what you're going for, the answer is yes.

Consistency is the basis of any strong brand identity, and that's exactly what a style guide brings to the table. By making sure all visual and written communications follow the same standards, you're improving overall user experience and letting customers know they can trust you.

The attention to detail you pay to how your brand shows up directly correlates to your customers' expectations of the service they can expect. In other words, if your branding is sloppy, customers will think everything else about working with you is sloppy as well.

Besides the obvious benefits of looking professional and trustworthy, a style guide also makes your content creation process easier. Since it provides clear guidelines, you'll be wasting less time on revisions and decision-making. And every time you add a new team member, you can use it as a training tool. That way, you can shorten your employee onboarding process by ensuring new hires understand the brand standards from day one.

Last, but not least, a style guide allows for controlled flexibility. It's a single place where you can update the rules to reflect a change in direction or incorporate new trends. And every time a change happens, you don't have to worry about notifying every team member separately. Instead, they just need to get on board with the updates in your style guide.

How to create a brand style guide

No matter whether you're creating a visual, editorial, or a combined style guide, you'll first need to some ground work. The three universal steps for creating any style guide are:

• Defining your brand. Put the brand’s mission, values, target audience, and unique selling propositions on paper. This helps you decide on visual and verbal elements that best represent your brand.

• Study competitors to identify industry standards, trends, and opportunities for differentiation.

• Research your audience to learn about their preferences, behaviors, and expectations.

Once you have this information, it will be much easier to pick the visual and editorial styles you want to go for.

What to include in a visual style guide

While "everything that relates to your visual brand identity" is the correct answer, it's not really a specific one. So, let's start with the obvious.

Make sure your visual style guide specifies the primary version of your logo. Include its full color version, as well as any variations you may have (e.g., grayscale, black and white).

Next, include guidelines on how to scale the logo for different applications so it always stays legible. You can also define the minimum white space required around the logo if you think you need to in order to ensure it maintains its integrity.

Once you have the logo down, define the color palette. Clearly state the primary and secondary brand colors, including their HEX and CMYK codes. Provide examples of complementary color combinations and guidelines for using them in backgrounds and accents.

Next up, typography. Start by specifying brand fonts and their uses (e.g., headings, paragraphs), then add guidelines for styles (e.g., what and when to italicize) and weights (e.g., light, regular, bold).

Since typography plays a huge role in visual hierarchy, you might also want to define font sizes for different content types. Include guidelines for letter spacing, line spacing, and preferred text alignment.

Visual style guide nice-to-haves

If you want to go beyond the basics with your visual style guide, there are some additional elements you can consider adding. For example, if you use a lot of imagery, you can define your preferred photography style that aligns with the brand image.

If you're more comfortable with using illustrations and graphics, you can define the style for them as well. Have patterns or textures as a part of your brand identity? Include them as well.

What to include in an editorial style guide

The main purpose of an editorial style guide is to ensure all your written communications reflect your brand voice, tone, and messaging strategy. The first thing you'll want to do is define your brand's personality. Is it formal? Funny? Conversational? Something else?

Then, specify how the tone changes depending on the context. For example, the tone of your website could be a bit more serious than the tone you use on social media.

Next, note down your preferred spelling variations. For example, if your communications are in English, you can specify the US or the UK spelling. This is also where you put any specific brand preferences (e.g., email vs e-mail, e-Signatures vs eSignatures).

Depending on your specific needs (and preferences), you can also add punctuation rules into your editorial style guide. For example, do you see the point of using a semicolon, ever? Do you think it should be said another way if it needs a semicolon? Do you not care and want to leave it up to the writer?

Another thing to consider is the title case you want to use and how you want to use it. For example, you could use the title case only in titles, but not headings. You could use title case in all titles and headings.

That said, title case isn't the only formatting decision you need to make. There are also lists, bullet points, paragraphs, and sentences, all of which have an impact on readability.

Do you capitalize the first letter of each word in a list or not? How many sentences is the minimum and maximum length of a paragraph? Is there a maximum number of words that can be in a sentence or do you leave it up to the writer's common sense?

Editorial style guide nice-to-haves

Now that you've got the basics covered, here are a few more things you might want to add, starting with specific words and phrases.

When it comes to terminology, you might want to avoid certain phrases due to sensitivity, ambiguity, or just because you don't like them. If so, make sure to mention those in your style guide.

Another thing to consider is including your internal terminology glossary. For example, if you're in the SaaS business, chances are your app has its own terms for specific functionalities and features. To make sure everyone's on the same page, you can add their definitions and preferred usage to the style guide.

You worked hard on your brand guidelines. Would be a shame if someone ruined them.

While we can't guarantee your guidelines will be respected everywhere, we can guarantee they'll be embedded into your documents if you use Better Proposals. Besides obvious brand identity elements such as your colors, logo, and fonts, you can also make your docs look like they've come from your own domain.

And since we're all about meeting and exceeding customer expectations, you can integrate live chat directly into your docs. Talk to your clients as they're reading, answer questions in real time, and give them a customer experience they won't forget.

But don't take our word for it. Instead, try it out for yourself. The first 14 days are on us.