How to create a brand style guide (plus examples!)
To build a strong and recognisable brand, you’re going to need the right assets – but the right assets won’t mean anything unless they’re used consistently and in the right way. That’s where your brand style guide comes in.
At Courtney Kim Studio, we’re obsessed with all things branding. But we’re equally passionate about making it easy for everyone in your business to roll-out our designs with ease.
To help, we’ve put together this blog to show you why a brand style guide is crucial to your success in business and a few awe-inspiring examples to get those creative juices flowing.
What is a brand style guide?
In essence, a brand style guide is a document that outlines how to bring your brand to life. It covers how to use your logo, typography, colour palette, taglines, design elements and images – pretty much everything to do with how your brand is presented to the world.
Inside its magical covers you’ll find rules that dictate the ‘dos and don’ts’ of your brand’s look and feel. But beyond that, a good brand style guide will take the core components of your business – your values, vision and mission – and translate it into an identity.
Having a brand style guide is useful for every medium to large sized business, especially if you have multiple teams or departments activating your brand in various ways. It’s also a useful tool for any contractors you might bring in for specific projects or for when you collaborate with a creative agency like ours.
Designing a brand style guide
The way we design our brand style guides here at Courtney Kim Studio begins with a brand strategy. Using our signature V3 method, we draw out the vision, visuals and verbal components of a brand, then the guide itself that follows lays out how to communicate all the different aspects.
How to create a style guide for your brand
Step 1: Know your ‘why’
To create a brand style guide for your brand, we first encourage you to spend time getting to know your brand from the inside out. When you’re confident about your vision, mission and values, we can build a style guide around that which truly reflects what you’re all about.
Understanding your ‘why’ will also form the basis of your brand story. This is the narrative you’ll tell about your business to the world. A captivating brand story plays a big role in why customers choose one brand over another, so it’s a brilliant opportunity to tell us why you’re amazing (and what makes you different).
Step 2: Know who you are
Take the time to define who your brand would be if it were a person, aka your brand personality. You might like to make a list of qualities or characteristics that reflect the kind of brand you want to build.
Are you classy or casual? Are you friendly or formal? Answering these kinds of questions can inform the visual and verbal markers that define your brand (and help it stand out from others in your industry, too).
Step 3: Know your target audience
Who are the people you want to help? What are their pain points, preferences, needs and desires? When you know your audience – by doing a little market research – you can craft a brand identity that’s designed for a particular group of people, as opposed to a general audience.
In our experience, the more you know about your audience, the better! This information can inform so many different aspects of your brand and business – from the kinds of colours to use in your logo, to what type of content to create, and even what photography to use on your website.
Step 4: Gather inspiration!
Have some fun – spend time pulling together some inspiration for your brand’s look and feel. Our go-to tool in Pinterest because it’s highly visual and collaborative, but even taking photos from magazines will work, too.
The purpose of this is to create a ‘mood’ or ‘vibe’ that represents your brand. Add in examples from other brands, any images or copy that you’ve used in the past that works well, and take note of anything that you repeat often. These are all useful tidbits of intel to include in your brand style guide or use as a jumping-off point for making any changes.
Step 5: Lock in the core components of your brand style guide
This is where the input of a creative professional can make all the difference. We can conceptualise your brand and translate it into design that reflects not only who you are but also those all-important business goals.
We like to break a brand style guide into six different parts:
Brand story: This is the story of who you are, what you stand for and where you’re going. It should be compelling and written in your brand voice.
Logo design: This needs to show how your logo is used, how it’s not used and what it’s composed of. Check out the Skype Brandbook for a good example of how to talk about logo placement.
Tone of voice: Your brand voice isn’t what you say it’s how you say it. You may like to work with a copywriter to get this nailed.
Typography: This is the fonts you use and how you use them. A great example is the style guide for blogging brand Medium.
Colour palette: This is the combination of colours that form your brand identity. In your brand style guide, add the swatches of the colours you’ll use and how to use them. We love Spotify’s design guidelines here for how to integrate their brand in a variety of ways.
Guidelines for creative assets: This is where rules for using assets like icons, websites, social media, packaging, photography, etc, live. Outlining these things will help to create consistency and make it easier for others to know what’s part of your brand and what isn’t.
A good rule of thumb to follow when creating your brand style guide is to keep it simple. Don’t overload the document with too many rules, but make sure you include the right information to make it easy for any team to pick it up and run with it.
Undergoing a brand refresh or want to update your brand style guide?
We’d love to hear from you! Contact us at the studio to learn more about our process and see how we can help you create a consistent brand across the board.