Brand Style Guides

Best Brand Style Guide
When it comes to creating a memorable brand, it’s all about consistency. When you’re shopping for your favorite laundry detergent or chips at the supermarket, you want to be able to spot it from the end of the aisle.
The best brands stay in our minds because their presence is defined by the repetition of the same logo, fonts, colors, and images. Once we see them a number of times, they become instantly recognizable, bringing us a clear sense of reliability and security.

Developing a consistent brand begins with building a Brand Style Guide.
A branding rule book helps graphic designers, marketers, web developers, community managers, and even product packaging departments all stay on the same page, and produce a unified vision of the brand to the public.

What is a Brand Style Guide?
A brand style guide is a document containing the rules and guidelines for the logo usage, design, and general look-and-feel theme of all of a brand’s collateral, digital presence, signage, apparel and advertising.

Effective Brand Style Guidelines Inform
The truly great brand guides do one thing above all else, and that’s inform. A guide’s most basic job is to educate everyone who sees it—whether it’s an employee, a member of the media, or a graphic designer—what the brand is and how to effectively implement it. This can be done in a variety of ways, but it all comes back to what information provided in the Brand Style Guidelines.

Effective Brand Style Guidelines Inspire
Inspire the team. Without a great brand, companies are generic, no-name entities. Brands take the faceless corporation or product and give it a personality. We make that personality evident in the Brand Style Guide. This helps teams own their brand’s voice and wear it with pride and direction.

Effective Brand Style Guidelines Enforce
In the end, the Brand Style Guide needs to be enforceable, and that means it spells out the don’ts in a plain-and-simple graphics and language.

Think of a few of the most recognizable brands. They are recognizable because of the consistency across of the messaging — written or visual — that brand conveys. The same brand colors are reflected across all mediums. The language sounds familiar. It’s all structured and, while not inflexible, it’s cohesive.

The purpose of the Brand Style Guide is to form and position various elements and spell out the entire brand so it is familiar.

Intrigued? Check out this sample –