Brand Style Guide: How to Create Visual Brand Guidelines

A brand style guide, also known as a brand book, comprises information about a business' overall look, feel, and visual identity. A brand style guide is the set of guidelines companies use to maintain a consistent brand from a visual perspective. The brand image describes a company's brand identity and makes it recognizable to a target audience, and successful companies work hard to build reliable brand iconography. A brand style rule book provides direction for brand colors, fonts, and images, so that companies can easily communicate the brand’s logo and core values.

Several brand elements go into these helpful guides, including:

1. 1. Color palette: Companies will rely on specific colors for brand consistency. Brand guides provide rules for using secondary colors and hex codes (alphanumerical color codes) to define the color schemes of a logo design; these will be in RGB (for web) and CMYK (for print).
2. 2. Name and tagline sizing: A brand book dictates a tagline’s size when it appears beside the company logo. The space and sizing of lettering are essential elements in a brand style guide.
3. 3. Photography: The kinds of photographs brands use—staged portraits versus candid shots, black-and-white photos versus color ones—will also form part of these branding guides.
4. 4. Templates: For visual consistency, your company’s brand guide might also come with templates with email designs and image sizes for social media platforms so that content fits into a preexisting structure apiece with the existing brand.
5. 5. Typography: A company’s typeface, or font, is a part of its brand personality. A crucial part of a company’s visual identity and brand strategy, typography design can evoke a mood and more clearly get messaging and tone of voice across in marketing materials.

Companies include these design elements into a brand kit, a compilation of visual materials and brand assets for maintaining a consistent brand visual identity. Brand kits are helpful, quick guides for freelance designers and marketers.

Making a brand style guide is a highly creative and organizational process. Follow these steps to make your company’s rulebook:

1. 1. Begin your guide with a brand story. Before diving into the brand guidelines and rules, open your brand style guide with your company’s mission statement with an accompanying image or logo that connotes the values of your business. This information will give the reader a firm foundation to understand your business and a strong sense of what all the subsequent imagery should convey.
2. 2. Discuss your brand voice. Written communication is generally an aspect of an editorial style guide, but sharing dos and don'ts of how text behaves concerning images, photos, and ads will be helpful for readers. Designers should understand the tone of your brand voice, which will come through both visually and verbally.
3. 3. Highlight different logo iterations. Logos will have to fit into ads tall and wide, square and round. Show your logo's adaptability so designers can see its many iterations better. Branding mogul Kris Jenner knows that designing a logo to fit a brand's ethos is challenging. For her part, she creates a vision board to brainstorm creative ideas. “Before social media and before everything was splashed everywhere, you knew that your logo was gonna go in print, on a billboard, maybe on television, if you were really lucky,” Kris says. “And now, it's a much different ballgame. So the images and the creative [elements] and the exposure to all of that is so much greater—the stakes are higher.”
4. 4. Include your typography. The brand identity includes the company’s font and spacing of letters and words. Articulate the design choice behind your font and how to employ written content in graphical contexts.
5. 5. Share your brand’s color palette. Companies typically have a primary logo color and secondary (and sometimes tertiary) colors that operate as accents. Show swatches of colors that define the look and feel of your brand. “When you start developing your brand, one of the first things you think about is your logo and the colors you're gonna use, what it's gonna feel like, and what is gonna be your palette,” Kris says. “If you want to choose pink, what color pink? There are a lot of decisions to be made, and I really feel like they're very important decisions.”

Brand style guides will be unique to each company, but you can apply these tips across various industries:

1. 1. Celebrate what makes your company unique. A good brand is memorable. Companies should communicate visually and tonally what makes their company stand out from competitors.
2. 2. If you rebrand, update your guide first. Rebrands require a significant effort and often come with an exciting press release and a flashy brand launch. However, once your company changes its brand, you don’t want to mistakenly use the old logo. Creating a new guide before the rebrand goes public can save designers from making mistakes as they will have a new set of guidelines at the ready.
3. 3. Know that branding is everywhere. Branding touches every piece of content and communication a company administers, including websites, social media pages, emails, direct mail, and paid ads. Brand consistency across platforms will lead to greater recognizability.

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