How to Create a Brand Style Guide

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A brand style guide is a living document that outlines stylistic requirements for maintaining one cohesive brand identity across various mediums such as digital, print, and broadcast. If a business plan is what guides the strategic direction of business operations, a style guide is what guides the strategic direction of a brand’s image.

This will allow you to put the foundation in place for growing your brand image in a consistent and scalable manner. However, don’t worry if you’re an older company that doesn’t have a brand style guide; it’s never too late to create one.

Why you need a brand style guide
Humans are creatures of habit. Just as dogs became conditioned to salivate at the ring of a bell during Pavlov’s conditioning experiment, so too can humans be conditioned based on consistent repetition. There is incredible value in creating a brand style guide for consistency across marketing channels.

What to do before you create a brand style guide
Creating a good style guide first requires understanding a brand’s current and future identity. Take time to brainstorm your brand’s identity, focusing on a few specific questions.

What are the foundational components of your brand?
Technically speaking, every brand should have some identifying characteristics. These elements could include your logo, color palette, typography, tagline, or jingle. These individual pieces come together to make the foundation of your brand’s outward image and are vital ingredients in your style guide.

What is your brand’s story?
Think strategically about your brand’s story and make sure to outline the important components of that story in your style guide.

Who are your customers?
If your customers are interested in country music but not classic rock, the style of your imagery and tone of your content would be drastically different.

What should go in a brand style guide
There are no hard and fast rules for a brand style guide, and many brands have customized style guides for different departments and marketing channels. Generally speaking, you should touch on a few key areas.

Visual elements
Most style guides are built to provide clarity on the visual elements of the brand. Imagery is one of the most important components of marketing, and it’s the easiest way for consumers to recall a brand. Therefore, the most important visual components of your brand’s image must be clearly outlined in the style guide. Do not leave room for ambiguity when it comes to your logo, color palette, typography, icons, or any other defining visual asset.

Copy elements
After you’ve defined your brand’s visual requirements, the next most important section is defining the copy parameters in your brand style guide. Just as you would use the same colors and logo in all your marketing collateral, so too should you use similar copy elements to create a consistent identity.

Whether you’re publishing copy on your website, social media channels, in pamphlets, or in an email, there shouldn’t be conflicting styles or messages. When defining copy requirements, think about tone, brand voice, and grammar.

Messaging requirements
While it might be easy to define color requirements or copy style, it can be much more difficult to outline messaging requirements. How do define your brand’s story or put requirements on your target audience? The answer is you can’t necessarily define messaging requirements – in fact, doing so could stunt the creative freedom that helps build your brand.

Rather, you should use your style guide to provide insight that can give context to your creatives as to how to create a message that resonates with your target audience and matches your brand’s image.

Think about including elements that help define your customers, topics that have historically worked well and general direction about your brand’s unique story. As you work on creating a brand style guide, try to answer questions that might arise from someone creating content for your brand.

Whether that content will be published on social media, posted on your blog, sent in an email, read in a magazine or heard through the radio, your brand style guide should provide a blueprint for creating content that is recognizable across any medium.

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