How to Create a Style Guide: 5 Components of a Style Guide

A style guide is a document that details a company’s set of standards for writing, editing, formatting, and designing documents. Also known as a writing style guide, this manual establishes the standard requirements for grammar, punctuation, tense, tone, wording, and writing best practices. A style guide typically consists of a set of official style guidelines (such as The Chicago Manual of Style or The Associated Press Stylebook) and supplementation of particular company rules or divergences from the official style. A style guide ensures clarity and consistency across written communications while maintaining brand identity and integrity.

A good style guide serves two main purposes:

• Keeps writers within guidelines. A copywriter has to adhere to an organization’s tone and style when crafting copy for public-facing marketing materials. A style guide lays out these rules for writers, offering them a well-organized set of guidelines to reference as they work. Style guides are especially useful for contract or freelance copywriters who are not familiar with the company’s particular house style.
• Helps editors maintain brand consistency. A comprehensive style guide provides editors will all the rules and guidelines they need to follow to keep your company’s communications error-free, consistent, and on-brand—from long-form copy to design.

If you want to build a style guide for your company, you’ll need to know the most common components of a style guide, such as:

• Official style guidelines. To create a company style guide, you need to choose an official style guide to follow. Official style guides contain rules for comma usage, capitalization, hyphens, sentence structure, and even graphic design. The most common styles are Chicago style (laid forth in The Chicago Manual of Style) and AP style (short for Associated Press and laid forth in The Associated Press Stylebook). Each style guide has different rules for punctuation and grammar based on different goals—for example, the Chicago style was originally developed for a university press, and many of its style preferences are based on best practices in literary and historical print publishing. Conversely, AP style was developed for news reporting, so many of its preferences are based on brevity and space-saving in journalism columns.
  
• Important divergences from the official style. In addition to the official style your brand will use, you’ll want to include any specific rules that you want to diverge from. For example, if you want to capitalize “customer” in your public-facing communications, you can make it an in-house rule in your style guide, overriding the official Chicago recommendation.
• Unique brand words or phrases. You will likely have a set of words or phrases that you’ve created around your product or service. You must include these brand words and phrases in your style guide since writers and editors won’t be able to look up how to spell, capitalize, or hyphenate these words. By including brand words in your style guide, you’ll ensure that those words and phrases are treated consistently throughout all of your written communications. You should also include your mission statement in your style guide so editors can ensure that it’s consistent across all channels.
• Your brand voice. When crafting your style guide, include the overall brand voice and tone for all of your communications. For your brand voice, define your ideal messaging tone of voice in a few words (Is your brand friendly? Scientific? Minimalist? Humorous?). Give examples of communications that you think perfectly match your desired tone. That way, both writers and editors can ensure that the copy they’re working on fits with your ideal image.
• Design guidelines. While you can feature more comprehensive brand guidelines in your official brand guide, it’s also a good idea to include some of the particular design guidelines. Editors can use these guidelines to avoid making design mistakes that violate brand identity. Design guidelines can consist of typography rules (from spacing to specific typefaces), brand color palettes, and iconography rules. To give writers and editors a better understanding of your brand identity, consider giving them a copy of your brand book. This book should include more of your brand story and detailed brand assets (like CMYK colors, RGB values, and hex codes).

A style guide is often confused with a similar document called a brand guide. While both documents lay out the guidelines of your company’s identity, a style guide focuses more on writing and editing copy. A brand guide focuses on the overall look, feel and visual identity of your business. Many people refer to a brand guide as a “brand style guide,” but a brand guide is a more global and design-focused document than a true style guide.

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