Learn about the three crucial components of a brand style guide — logo, fonts, and colors — and how they can help you maintain consistency across all platforms. Perfecting these basics can save you time and money, and later expand your style guide.
3 Crucial Components for Your Brand's Style Guide: Logo, Fonts, and Colors
What if every employee you hired could simply glance at one page to understand your brand? What if they were immediately aware of the values your business upholds and the image you want to project across all platforms?
This wish can come true with the help of a brand style guide. A single document that is periodically updated can keep an entire team on task with far less effort.
A brand style guide acts as a cheat sheet of writing and design guidelines that visually expresses your brand if you’re looking for a practical solution to maintain consistency across all members of your team or project.
Send your style guide to your new graphic designer so they can properly size your social media images, or give a physical copy to your printer so they can create and print banners or flyers for you.
In either case, you should start by developing your style guide. To construct a fantastic one, you need these 3 components:
1. Your Logo.
Even while your brand is much more than simply your logo, you should still include it in your style guide because it is a crucial component of your brand. It is what distinguishes your brand across platforms and is frequently what potential customers notice first. Include all of your logos, especially if you have more than one.
When creating images for internet or print, a freelance graphic designer may want options. Make sure you include a few logo choices with translucent backgrounds to use as overlays on landing pages and social media graphics. A wonderful strategy to safeguard your images and improve the appearance of your brand visuals is to design your logo as an overlay.
2. Your Fonts.
Although a picture may be worth a thousand words, the fonts you choose for your brand identity can convey a lot more. The look and feel of your brand can be significantly altered by using a different font. Some are traditional. Some are grave. Some people play. Keep a variety of typefaces in your brand toolkit, but be consistent in your colour pairings.
You can also specify the typefaces to use for titles versus body material in this portion of your style guide, as well as how you want your copy to be formatted. This saves time by allowing all of your team’s authors to format their work correctly the first time around rather than requesting revisions.
3. Your Colors.
Is your brand jovial and upbeat, sinister and enigmatic, or in the middle?
Both the fonts and the colours you select for your brand have an effect. In addition to storing the codes for each colour for web and print use, your brand style guide is an excellent place to display your colours in a grid.
Look to top brands for ideas when deciding which colours to add because every colour scheme sets a different tone. Consider automobiles. Greys, blacks, silvers, and golds are used by opulent brands like Lexus. More blue, which stands for dependability and durability, is used by brands that are more family-friendly, including Ford and Volkswagen.
Perfect the fundamentals, then advance from there.
typefaces, colours, and logos. The three fundamental components of any brand style guide should include these to help you save time and money. You can later include standards for photography, iconography, and web-specific features if you want to expand your style guide.
Include your ideal target market, customer avatar, and brand purpose statement as well. You have complete discretion over what to include. As you consult with your team to determine what should be included or removed, you can modify your style guide over time.
You will be well on your way to branded nirvana if you start with these fundamental components.