What are Brand Style Guidelines?

As per Bynder, brand style guide, often known as brand guidelines, governs the composition, design, and overall look and feel of a company’s branding. The content of a logo, blog, website, advertisement, and other marketing assets might be dictated by the set of rules in your brand guide. Creating a brand style guide is the first step in developing a consistent brand. These branding guidelines assist graphic designers, web developers, community managers, product packaging departments, and even marketers to stay on the same page and present the public with a coherent brand image.

​A set of rules that defines how a company’s logo, colours, typography, iconography, and visuals communicate to the consumer is known as brand guidelines. This critical tool provides organisations and designers with defined criteria for successfully and consistently communicating the brand. Failure to establish and adhere to brand guidelines may endanger the integrity of your brand. Thus, you must note that companies that take the time to create brand guidelines help to ensure that their brand image is consistent regardless of where it appears. 

This will pay off handsomely in the long run since your company will develop the familiarity and dependability that leads to brand loyalty. Here are a few instances of how well-crafted brand guidelines may help your company:

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​Quality control is not solely the responsibility of your creative team or art director when you design, distribute, and enforce well-documented brand rules for every individual in your company. You can be confident that you are constantly putting out material you are proud of with hundreds of eyes on every piece of content that gets designed in line with a well-planned branding style.

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​You will devote a significant amount of time, work, and energy to developing your visual identity. This will result in having brand guidelines that have been defined and published to help your designers to express your brand to the consumer adequately. When your creative team develops around these colour, typography, imagery, and logo positioning requirements, it delivers a superior content experience for the customer. It is crucial to note that customers are more inclined to buy your products or services if they can readily relate to your personality, understand what you do, and see how it will benefit them.

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Most people, whether they realise it or not, recognise and appreciate outstanding design when they see it. When a potential buyer sees something well-designed and professional, they will naturally regard that product or brand as superior to a poorly designed one. This perception will acquire the consumer’s trust. And if you can establish a customer’s trust, you may be able to make a sale.

Brand rules make a brand trustworthy not only through design quality but also through consistency. Thus, if a brand’s appearance and behaviour change over time, the consumer may lose faith in them since they do not know who they truly are.

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​Brand rules assist your company in delivering a consistent brand experience, making it easier for customers to identify your content. Your brand standards will ensure that the customer has a great experience at every touchpoint. Customers will come to expect and rely on only the highest quality material from your company. As a result, you will gain loyal brand advocates and grow your essential brand equity.

The purpose of brand style guidelines is to help guarantee that your brand is delivered correctly internally and consistently to your target audience. You can promote a distinctly recognisable brand identity to stand out from competitors and remain remembered in the thoughts of consumers by rigorously sticking to brand guidelines.

Brand guidelines should be communicated and understood throughout the organisation. Even a single wrongly applied logo can harm a brand’s reputation for quality and professionalism. A brand book with all of the brand information is a wonderful concept. More detailed material should be included, such as website templates, advertising and editorial rules, and advice on the branding on social media and tone of voice.

Sharing brand rules and gaining team buy-in is critical for preserving control of your image and the values you communicate to the public. It can be challenging for team members who are not marketing or design-oriented to grasp how to use images or typefaces or to follow the tone of voice and style rules. Your internal team and external suppliers may be confident that they are endorsing your brand’s image and values in a positive, professional manner if you create and share clear and comprehensive brand guidelines that are easy to understand.

Building a brand image takes time, and sustaining a strong brand image requires a team effort. Brand standards can assist you in ensuring that your brand identity is globally identifiable, unified, consistent, and of the highest quality.

The first step toward correctly and consistently using your brand is to set brand rules, but what are brand guidelines for?

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​A great brand image can allow you to communicate your beliefs, what you do, and what you stand for. It also highlights your personality and approach, which are essential factors in your clients’/customers’/users’ purchase decisions, as your brand is what distinguishes you from your competition.

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Again, consistency is your goal. Maintaining a professional demeanour requires consistency. If the picture and font sizes on your website, social media, and communications are different, you will look disjointed. Creating a tight set of brand rules will help you to emphasise your professionalism across every part and application of your brand.

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​Successful businesses are those that people remember and that stick in the memories of their clients/customers/users. The uniformity your rules will provide will ensure that you maximise your brand recognition over time.

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​Your brand standards will provide your staff with clear, simple instructions that they can follow to ensure that your brand is always used correctly.

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​When your brand’s identity remains consistent, its perceived worth rises. This is not only because you will appear more professional; it will also make it easier to maintain the quality and integrity of your brand.

​A brand guideline can be a few to a hundred pages long and comprehensively depicts how a firm acts, talks, and looks. When developing brand guidelines, it is critical to begin with the brand essence before moving on to the visual components. The brand purpose statement, attitude, and promise are excellent introductions. These provide context for the graphics that follow and assist the reader in obtaining a complete knowledge of what the company stands for. 

A basic guideline document’s digital visual components typically include the following:

• The logo, along with a description of what it signifies, alternative compositions, sizing, required white space, and instances of both correct and erroneous usage (what to do and what not to).
• Typography can include distinct typefaces for web and print, and it is commonly made up of more than one typeface, usually to distinguish headlines from body text.
• Brand colours are sometimes divided into primary and secondary palettes, as well as technical qualities (Pantone, RGB, CMYK values).
• Applications that demonstrate how all of these components interact with one another. A few instances of the brand in action — stationery, advertising, web use, etc., are usually sufficient.

These elements are a wonderful place to start when developing a solid foundation for a brand’s visual language. More detailed standards include other communication vehicles like patterns, iconography, graphics, or other gadgets, as well as images and video that aid in conveying the brand’s messaging. In order to further reinforce the brand’s visual presence, the brand guideline should be styled in accordance with the concepts specified in the document.

Some good examples of brand guidelines are Skype, Medium, Google, and Mozilla, among many more.

A brand styleguide includes much more than a logo. It graphically represents everything your brand stands for, even down to the goal of your company. The key elements that make or break a brand style guide include:

• The brand mission statement

• The buyer persona

• A colour palette

• An editorial style

• Typography and font guidelines

  
  

Now let us get into the details of each of these elements and their role.

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​Your mission statement is an action-oriented declaration that declares the objective of your organisation, serving as the compass for your brand style guide. It guarantees that all your content serves the same purpose and connects with your audience. This statement can serve as the foundation for your blog and paid content, ad copy, graphic media, and tagline.

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​A buyer persona is a fictitious depiction of your ideal customer. It comprises information about your customer’s job title, age, gender, and professional obstacles, thereby determining who your brand publishes content for. Your buyer persona directs your blog material, ad language, and visual media, which can help your organisation attract valuable leads and consumers.

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​The objective of an editorial style guide is to establish an editorial stylebook on how to phrase specific items, identify themes that the company can and cannot write about, and other businesses that can be mentioned. The content of your blog, video scripts, website and landing page text, PR talking points, and knowledge base articles can all be directed by your editorial style guide. It can also direct your brand’s voice and personality, ensuring that your message is consistent across all media.

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​Typography is a visual component of your brand style guide that extends beyond the font of your corporate logo. It backs up your blog design all the way down to the links and material on your website, including your slogan. Typography is important for the user experience of your website, so make sure it is visually appealing while still being accessible and easy to understand. Thus, the brand style guide’s objective is to create and manage all of the numerous parts of a firm that, when combined, spell out the entire brand as it is known.

Apart from these, various other components must be taken into account in order to create an appropriate brand style guide.

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The writing style is not typically the first thing that comes to mind when considering brand identification, yet brand voice significantly impacts how your audience perceives you. You can approach this in a variety of ways, just like with imagery.

Best practise: Provide instances of messaging that work successfully for you.

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Build on personality: Have a list of 3-5 adjectives that reflect your brand’s personality to indicate the type of language that is on-brand.

Dos and Don’ts: Sometimes, the simplest solution is the best. Choose terms you like and words you do not want to display your brand voice properly.

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​Introduce your company to the rest of the world. A brief summary will provide individuals with insight into the heart and soul of your organisation, allowing them to understand better how to represent your brand. All of the five major brand components—mission, brand vision, audience, personality, and values—can be incorporated. You can also choose to share only a portion of that publicly. Determine what to add based on what will be most useful as a reference point. Everything else in your brand standards should be consistent with these essential elements.

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It is now time to go into some of your brand’s finer points. There will be no goal statements or speeches here, just the nuts and bolts of your look, voice, and style. This is a five-part diagram of the nuts and bolts. It begins with discrete, generally quantitative, and demonstrable facts about your firm in the outer portions and then delves into your brand’s core essence (or, if you prefer, soul).

Attributes: These are the obvious facts about your firm that a prospective customer or employee would discover while studying you. It is high-level information about you, like a bird’s-eye view, but it is based on data or verifiable information. Most of them are not things you choose; they are just natural components of running a business. They could even be found on a sales sheet.

Benefits: This is not just marketing or a decent return on investment. It is more particular than that; it is the individuals your firm works with and what you provide them that your competitors may not offer or even consider. Consider the decision-makers who buy from you and why they do so.

Core Values: This is more of an internal message than anything you will present to your customers in response to the query, “what sort of company do we want to be?” If you have not yet defined yours, plenty of outstanding examples of company core values are available for inspiration.

Brand Personality: This is not just what you will present in your marketing; it is your internal personality, the qualities that a new hire must possess. It is how you collaborate and solve problems together that determines whether or not someone will fit in your organisation. While you need diversity on your team, having these attributes will make a team member effective regardless of what other traits they share.

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​When you look at everything you’ve accumulated up to this point, you can see where it all fits together and what the essence of your firm is. It can be your slogan or catchphrase, or it can simply be something personal to you. But, in any case, it is you.

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​Branding necessitates a great deal of particular information. You might want to include the following:

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• The necessary space surrounding your logo

• Colour variants of your logo versus grayscale ones

• The smallest size your logo can be

• You must always use your logo correctly so that when people see it, they are immediately reminded of your brand

Furthermore, you most likely invested a significant amount of time and/or money designing your logo design, and you want it to be handled in a visually pleasing manner. Hence, being clear about your logo guarantees that no one on your marketing team mishandles it and distributes marketing materials that do not reflect your visual identity.

​As you can see, the brand style guide’s objective is to create and manage all of the numerous parts of a firm that, when combined, spell out the whole brand as it is known. Below are few examples of Brand Style Guidelines.

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​Walmart is one of the world’s largest and most well-known companies; hence its brand guide is extensive. The brand’s logo, photography, typography, graphics, iconography, voice, editorial style, and other elements are all included in the guide. Walmart’s colour palette is essential to its corporate identity and is known as “Walmart Blue.”

• Mission

As a brand mission statement example, the objective of Walmart is to create and manage a unified brand experience that enables Customers, Associates, and Communities to live better lives.

• Logo

The Walmart wordmark and Spark are significant expressions of the brand identity. By using the wordmark consistently, they improve the awareness and exposure of the brand.

• Colour

Walmart Blue is an important brand symbol. The primary logo colour combination includes blue, white and spark yellow. These are the colours that comprise our primary colour palette and should be used whenever possible.

• Typography

Walmart’s custom font is Bogle, inspired by the spark and named after one of Sam Walton’s first store managers. It is modern, friendly, and versatile.

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Starbucks’ interactive brand style guide contains information on using the distinctive Siren logo and green colour palette. In addition, the book includes a visual spectrum of how their creative assets can be used across various platforms, as well as case studies of various seasonal campaigns and product launches.

• Voice

Starbucks is confidently lowering the number of competing messages to elevate the experience, removing barriers to people finding exactly what they are looking for at Starbucks. They make more room for brand relevance, connection, and excitement by employing both functional and expressive voices.

• Logo

The preferred method is to use the Siren logo alone, unlocked from the wordmark, giving it more importance while retaining a considered, open, and modern presentation.

• Colour

Starbucks uses a family of greens to boost brand recognition for a fresh and inviting touch, nodding discreetly to its legacy while propelling them into a global future. They always ensure that brand greens are present in the composition or through the logo’s appearance.

• Typography

Sodo Sans, Lander, and Pike are three brand fonts used throughout. While abandoning hand-lettering, they still include specific adjustments to these typefaces when an artistic touch is required.

Netflix is mainly concerned with the treatment of its emblem when it comes to public brand assets. The corporation provides a straightforward set of guidelines for the size, spacing, and placement of its iconic capitalised typeface and a single colour code for its traditional red logo.

• Logo

Netflix leads the high-awareness market with its N Symbol. The alphabet appears ubiquitous and instantly recognisable as shorthand for the brand. However, without Netflix Red, the N Symbol may not be recognised. Thus, it is always displayed in the company’s distinctive hue.

• Colour

They ensure that the symbol appears in the brand standard Red and the Symbol Dark Red. The Wordmark should appear in the brand standard Red, except when limited by production.

​To sum things up, when you look at our entire set of brand guidelines, it might be intimidating — even overwhelming. If you have never considered these topics, there is much to take in all at once. But, while there is a method, a formal path from “nothing” to thoroughly knowing your brand, it is a lot simpler than that at its core. In reality, you are conducting dialogues about yourself. You are considering who you are and who you want to be, as well as how you and everyone in your business may demonstrate that to others.