Keeping Your Brand Identity Consistent
Style guides define your brand identity and messaging, keeping your design elements consistent across all platforms and communications. It outlines your brand colours, font, logo size and placement, and the overall tone of your brand.
It’s an important tool for marketers, copywriters, graphic designers, and web developers, ensuring that your brand is consistent across print, digital media, and other collateral. A fully developed style guide should include:
- Examples of how a logo can and can’t be used,
- Acceptable fonts, the acceptable size, and their variations – light, medium, bold, etc
- Colour swatches and their colour codes: HEX, RGB, Pantone and CMYK
Some style guides will go as far as including certain words or phrases that should be incorporated often, while there may be others that should be avoided at all costs (sometimes because they’re strongly associated with a competitor). You can find some great examples of style guides in this great Hubspot blog.
So why is a style guide so important?
Consistency
A style guide promotes consistency among all your promotional items. This means no matter how, when or where a customer experiences your brand, they are experiencing the same underlying traits. It’s this consistency on every touch-point that helps build your brand and brand loyalty. Consistency is vital in order to ensure your brand is also clearly defined.
It saves designers time!
A style guide saves designers time by giving clear answers to questions such as “Which colour and font should I make the heading?” Or “Where should I position the logo and how much space should I give it?” A style guide streamlines the process of composition making the the process of creating new content much faster.
Professionalism
By adhering to your style guide you are able to communicate your message with clarity on all items, which helps develop trust and engagement. A style guide helps to communicate your key messages with one voice, as one brand making it more defined and memorable, and thus overall making you look more professional.
A style guide is essential to keep your brand identity consistent, recognizable, and ownable, even as several different people develop content for your brand. Since a style guide defines the guidelines for maintaining a brand’s identity, it’s important to spend the time and resources to get it right.
