Marketing Asset: Brand Style Guide
This marketing asset will make it easier & faster for your production team to create visuals.
In this article, I focus on a key marketing asset that I see many businesses forgo, much to their detriment.
What is it?
A Brand Style Guide.
In short, this important document codifies all the visual aspects of your brand.
Its sole purpose is to maintain a consistent look and feel for any marketing visuals you create, including but certainly not limited to:
Your website
Landing pages
Social media graphics
Slide decks
Business cards
Advertisements (both offline and online)
Letterhead
And more!
A Brand Style Guide ensures that any time anyone on the team (including you) creates something visual, there will be far fewer revisions required.
Have you ever had an experience where you hired someone to help you and their first draft was so far off what you envisioned / hoped for / wanted?
Yeah, this should help prevent that by giving the creator of the visuals some important guidelines.
(By the way, too many revisions are everyone’s nightmare. They typically result in a delay in the project timeline and an increase in its cost. They’re also a surefire way to drive the executor nuts and can result in high team turnover.)
Now, there are many ways to go about creating a Brand Style Guide. And you can enlist the help of a branding expert or graphic designer. But, if you’re on a budget, you can also DIY it until you’re ready to level up.
Below, I’m going to share with you what you absolutely need to define in your Brand Style Guide. And, I’m going to show you the Ferrari version of a Brand Style Guide and the DIY version. That way, you can pick the path that makes the most sense for your business right now.
The whole point of a Brand Style Guide is to define the common elements that make up your brand visuals, ensuring that any time anyone on the team (including you) creates something, there will be far fewer revisions required.
Even if you haven’t been through a formal branding process for your business, it’s still important to have a Brand Style Guide to document the guidelines that do exist now.
And remember, a Brand Style Guide will evolve as your business evolves…that is the normal part of the process.
Here’s what your Brand Style Guide should absolutely define:
Fonts
You need to write stuff in your marketing assets, right?
Therefore, defining which fonts your brand uses and how to use them is important.
This will not only preserve a consistent look, but it should make it easier for someone to read and digest what you’ve written on your marketing asset…whether it’s your website, a slide deck, or your business card.
Ideally, you are only using a couple of different fonts…too much variation means the eye and brain will be distracted from the content you want them to consume.
Imagine a hoarder's house…too many items inside means you can’t appreciate the home’s beauty and space. The same goes for your fonts.
You should not only specify which fonts your brand uses in the Brand Style Guide but how they are used.
Which fonts are used in headlines? In Sub-headlines? In body font? In buttons? And how are they styled in these various elements?
When do you use bold? Italic? All caps? Sentence case?
I know this sounds perhaps overly detailed but when you think about the amount of visuals you have to create to market your business, the fewer BRAND decisions a designer has to make, the better the creative will turn out.
(Trust me, we’ve worked with a lot of designers on behalf of our clients and know how to ensure the visual part of a marketing asset is executed well, quickly and stands out.)
Color Palette
Defining the color palette that your brand uses makes creating visuals SOOOO much easier.
It also helps with brand recognition, meaning you want people to see your colors and immediately think of your business.
Your Brand Style Guide should lay out the colors your brand uses, ideally including the Hex codes and RGB values so it’s easy for a designer to quickly pull the exact color when designing a creative.
It should also define where and how each color is used. Is the bright accent color only used sparingly and to draw attention to key parts of a marketing asset? Or is it typically the background color?
Are there different tones and/or hues used when more colors are needed that the primary palette?
Laying all of this out in your Brand Style Guide is crucial.
By setting your fonts and color palette, you’ll immediately be a leg up over any business that doesn’t have a Brand Style Guide. It’s barebones, but it will do the job.
When you’re ready to level up, here are a few “nice-to-have but not absolutely necessary” elements in your Brand Style Guide:
Logo Use
What are all the variations of your logo that exist? Color, black and white, wordmarks, icons, etc.
How much space needs to exist around the logo any time you’re using it?
Sounds nitpicky, but you’ll get a much better final product from a designer if you explicitly define this.
Decorative Elements
What kind of graphics, icons, textures, shapes, and illustrations does your brand use?
How and where are they employed? How do you combine them?
You’ll notice on this page on our site, Bixa has a very distinctive illustration style. This is an important decorative element for our brand.
Photography
Does your brand use photographs in its visuals? If yes, define the common elements of photos that align with your brand.
You’ll ensure that whoever is shooting custom photos for the business has a clear direction. You’ll also save anyone searching for stock photos an enormous amount of time by creating these guidelines for them.
To tie it all together, now I’m going to show you a few examples of Brand Style Guides so you see how to put all of these elements together.
There are many ways to approach the creation of your Brand Style Guide – you can go with the Ferrari version, DIY version or somewhere in between.
It largely depends on your budget and the level of expertise is needed.
I’m going to show you 3 different examples so you can pick the version that makes the most sense for your business right now.
Example #1: Barebones Style Guide in Canva
Here, I walk you through Bixa’s barebones Brand Style Guide that exists in Canva and allows our team to create graphics without having to lean on our graphic designer.
It basically defines the color palette, fonts and includes some decorative elements, that’s it.
(By the way, it’s not that our graphic designer isn’t fabulous – she is. But for visuals that have a short shelf-life, like social graphics, we don’t want to invest a ton of time or money but still want these to look professional. Clear brand guidelines in Canva allows us to DIY when we want to save.)
Example #2: Quick & Dirty Brand Style Guide created by a professional graphic designer
Here, you get to see an example of a quick and dirty Brand Style Guide created by a professional graphic designer for my husband’s new business.
I say “quick and dirty” because that was the brief I provided the designer. Why? Because we wanted the branding to give a great first impression but my husband didn’t want to invest all his marketing budget in the brand creation process.
(This is a common mistake I see with startup businesses – thinking if you create the beautiful branding and build a website, new customers will be lining up around the block. In my experience, most of the marketing budget should go towards the promotion of your business, not the branding of your business. And remember, your brand can absolutely evolve and you can invest more later as the business becomes more profitable.)
This Brand Style Guide is perfect for what his business needs right now. There’s a clear visual direction, it’s laid out for any designer to
Example #3: Full Shebang Brand Style Guide created by a professional branding agency
Follow us on Instagram to see this comprehensive Brand Style Guide created by a branding agency for one of our clients. (We’ll be sharing it next week!)
This includes all of the elements mentioned in my last email and more, making it SOOOO easy for the design team to create standout visuals.
This Brand Style Guide was created during a rebrand, which we are still in the process of helping the client roll out.
(Remember how I mentioned above that you can invest in comprehensive branding as your business evolves? This is a great example of that.)
Hopefully, I’ve answered a LOT of your questions about this important marketing asset in this article.
If I missed anything or you have questions, comment below.
Or, if you want to enlist help in creating your Brand Style Guide and want a vendor recommendation, reach out to support@bixamedia.com.