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April 15, 2022

Branding Guidelines 101 – The Ultimate Guide To Brand Style Guide Essentials

Branding Guidelines

The necessity of branding and marketing is indisputable for every company, whether it is a small firm or a large corporation. 

Your company name, brand identity, and logo design are what make you stand out so you better make sure they are on a certain level.

This means you will have to create brand guidelines that will be unique and effective to your own brand style guide. It’s time to put the company name on a mood board and start coming up with brand guidelines and a brand style guide that will work for your specific situation.

If you’re not sure where to begin, keep reading to find out more about brand guidelines.

What is a brand guide and what are the most important brand guidelines? Time to find out!

What Are Branding Guidelines & Brand Style Guide?

mission, vision, values

A brand style guide, often known as brand guidelines, is essentially an instruction manual and rule book for communicating your brand.

They include all of the visual brand elements as well as vital information about the company’s messaging, voice and tone. They are available in the form of a physical or digital booklet of core values that includes examples of what to do and what not to do.

Consider the most well-known brands you can think of. Because of the constancy of the messaging (either written or visual) these brands convey, you’ve probably learned to recognize them. They all have the same brand colors on them. The language appears to be familiar. Everything is well-organized and, while it is not rigid, it is cohesive.

When businesses take the time to set brand guidelines, they can ensure that their image is consistent across all platforms, establishing a recognizable brand image.

Brand guidelines include all aspects of a company’s identification, including:

  • Logo variations: secondary logos, full logos, icons
  • Color palette: primary/secondary colors
  • Typography: font size, font style, spacing
  • Voice and tone of voice: how the company utilizes language and emotion
  • Other: images, artwork, illustrations, etc.

In the long term, following brand guidelines and coming up with a brand style guide will pay off handsomely, as your organization will establish the familiarity and dependability that leads to brand loyalty.

Even if you have multiple individuals working on customer support, marketing, design, and sales, using a brand book guarantees that your brand looks and feels the same.

Why Is Having A Brand Style Guide Important?

Why Is Having A Brand Style Guide Important?

A brand’s personality is undeniably a huge, important part of any brand out there. A company’s branding plays a vital role in the outcome of the business – it practically guarantees success or failure to some point.

The way customers and other brands view your brand can make or break you, so you better make sure to provide a memorable brand image.

Think carefully about the following:

  • What kind of brand message do you want to send?
  • What are the core values your brand represents?
  • What do you see as your visual identity?

Once you have the answers to these questions, you can start browsing brand guidelines and brand guidelines examples, or you can come up with your own style guide – just make sure your own guidelines are in line with other strong brand guidelines.

You can even find a brand guidelines template from a free resource online that can help you get started. The Internet is full of useful brand guidelines templates that will be of immense help to create a unique brand voice.

Branding Essentials For Your Business: What Are The 8 Elements Of Branding

Branding Essentials For Your Business: What Are The 8 Elements Of Branding

While logo variations and a website are pretty important parts of a brand story, there are other aspects that should not be underestimated.

A logo is only a small part of a brand style guide. It aesthetically encapsulates everything your brand stands for, even down to the mission of your company. However, a brand style guide can be made or broken by a few crucial things.

There are different brand elements you have to consider if you want to create a consistent brand voice. Brand consistency is key, whether you’re making marketing material, choosing the brand color palette and other visual brand elements or design elements.

Let’s go over brand guidelines and own brand guidelines examples that can help you create a true brand identity.

Here are the best corporate brand guidelines:

1. Brand Identity

Brand Identity

A company’s or a business’s brand is one of its most valuable assets. Contrary to common assumption, a company’s brand is more complex than we originally imagined, which is a few memorable slogans, flashy and brilliant colors, logos, and some fonts. 

A brand is a corporate image that can have a big influence on a company’s market performance. This ‘corporate image’ or a brand book serves a delicate purpose: to help a customer recognize your company’s visual representation in a crowded market.

A brand exists to reflect the overall image and meaning of a business while also allowing customers to form a deep and meaningful relationship with what your brand stands for, as well as the psychological propensity to choose your brand over others.

This is particularly important for any new brand out there that is trying to get new customers.

Brands can increase and strengthen consumer loyalty, boost corporate performance, and make new and potentially loyal customers easier to identify. 

A brand is also an ‘identity design’ that helps a corporation transition from its existing conditions to its ideal ones. Since we’re talking about design, a brand might include a variety of visual cues such as products, services, marketing collateral, stationery, statements, actions, and, of course, a logo.

2. Logo

business branding essentials

The major problem with having a business or a firm is that it must be distinct and stand out from the competition.

A logo must permit the visual identification of a brand in order to stand out and overshadow rival alternatives to your firm. This is something many brand owners struggle with in the beginning – how to come up with a memorable and unique logo that perfectly captures your brand identity?

As previously said, a logo is one of a brand’s key visual devices; as such, it plays an important part in marketing and is one of the branding fundamentals that any firm requires.

In the old days, for a marketing strategy to work all you needed was a brand and a logo. Nowadays, digital branding and marketing have in themselves become completely separate marketing strategies. 

To be more precise, online branding has taken over the marketing and advertising world, for a reason; your logo can appear anywhere, but most importantly, it creates demands for appropriate websites. 

Digital branding essentials and websites are the ‘dream team’ for any company’s successful presence and identification on the market.

So, find a brand guide that you and your designer can follow to come up with a full logo, secondary logos & logo variations, color palette, design elements, strong brand guidelines, and so on.

3. Website

laptop, wordpress, wordpress design

Websites are consistent, generate self-demand for advertisements, and produce clients and profit for any company. They’re also a fantastic method to make your brand and logo stand out and achieve their maximum visual potential.

Not to mention that they provide for more natural interaction with customers, offering them easy access to information about your company. Also, it helps keep in touch with your brand and develop a relationship with it. 

Customers can also use your website to spread the word about your company to their family and friends for free. A website, combined with a brand and a logo, may make a huge difference in your company’s identity, style, and tone. 

You’ll also be able to maintain a consistent presence in both the offline and online worlds.

Furthermore, by including a brand and logo into your website design, you can be sure that your SEO ranks will skyrocket, keeping in mind the white space. 

Logos and branding requirements are a big part of SEO’s online and offline marketing strategy, as well as the brand style guide. 

This is due to Google’s increasing association of your business with online searches, and appropriate internet queries with your brand’s website. Contact us at Eggs Media, a multi-award-winning web design firm, and let’s get on the same page about your brand & brand guide!

4. Mission Statement

Mission Statement

Your brand style guide’s compass is your mission statement. It guarantees that all of your material serves the same purpose. Your blog and paid content, ad copy, graphic media, and slogan can all be guided by this message.

It is an action-oriented declaration of an organization’s purpose to its target audience. A general explanation of the organization, its function, and its goals is frequently included.

As a company expands, its aims and goals may be met, and they will change as a result. As a result, as earlier goals are fulfilled, mission statements should be amended as appropriate to reflect the business’s new culture.

5. Buyer Persona

Buyer Persona

A buyer persona is a fictional character who represents your ideal customer.

It specifies who your company publishes content for by including information on your customer’s job title, age, gender, and professional obstacles. Your buyer persona directs the content of your blog, ad copy, and visual media.

Buyer personas are figments of a buyer’s imagination based on statistics and research.

This level of management involves managing a lot of people and/or tasks in your company. They assist you to focus your efforts on certifying leads, directing the development of your product to meet the needs of your target market, and organizing all business operations (from marketing to sales to service).

You’ll be more appealing to high-value visitors, prospects, and customers who are more likely to stay as a result of this.

Knowing your buyer personas inside and out will allow you to produce more relevant and engaging content, develop better products, conduct stronger sales follow-ups, and essentially anything else that entails gaining new customers and keeping old ones.

Buyer personas assist you in better comprehending your consumers and potential clients.

You’ll be able to modify your content, marketing, product development, and services to better cater to the wants of your target audience since you have a 360-degree perspective on your prospects, their needs, behaviours, and concerns.

6. Color Palette

printing, the colors, pattern

Your color palette is a set of colors that your firm uses to develop its brand, and it guides the creation of all visual content. These color combinations govern your logo, site design, printed marketing, and event collateral, and are frequently based on HEX codes or RGB color codes.

You must choose the colors you want to utilize while designing the look of your new business website which will help tell the brand story using the brand style guide.

Your color palette should support your identity, make your site readable and easy to navigate, and – above all – look nice to make a positive impact on visitors and drive more purchases.

Finding colors that “look well” together, however, isn’t as simple as it may appear. Many elements influence how we see and react to color on a perceptual and emotional level using the selected color palette.

Even if we have an intuitive feel of which color schemes work well and which don’t, this makes it tough to establish an effective and unique website color scheme from scratch.

Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all color palette that will generate leads and sales from your website and marketing collateral. If only it were as simple as that.

There are two factors to think about while selecting colors for your website using the brand style guide:

  • Color theory – the study of how colors and pictures interact to create an appealing design in the brand book.
  • Color psychology – explains how the colors you choose might affect how others perceive your brand.

Color psychology may help you create a subversive feel, while color theory can assist you to choose colors that work well together (such as avoiding putting pink text on a purple background because it will damage your site’s readability) (like choosing blue for a calming effect).

One option is to begin with a single hue or mood and work your way backward to develop your color scheme. Alternatively, you can take cues from your favorite brand or company that has already done so regarding the visual identity of the brand.

Picking the right color palette for your company and brand might sound like a no-brainer, but it’s so much more than that – you need to create the brand colors. Check out any brand style guide and you’ll see why!

7. Editorial Brand Style Guide

mcdonalds, editorial, chain

An editorial style guide’s job is to create an editorial stylebook on how to phrase particular items, as well as a list of issues the brand may and cannot write about, as well as other firms it can reference.

Blog material, video scripts, website and landing page text, PR talking points, and knowledge base articles can all be influenced by your editorial style guide.

Businesses these days produce a startling amount of content, and as that number grows, more inconsistencies are sure to emerge.

Failure to settle on and record agreed editorial guidelines is a recipe for uneven messaging, whether it’s due to a lack of clarity about the style you’d like to write in or a lack of communication among your organization’s many content writers.

As a result, most businesses recognize that they will need to create a writing style guide at some point to create the brand’s personality.

The existence of a writing style guide is what keeps you from being caught up in an argument over whether there should be gaps before and after an ellipsis, if you should capitalize “for” in a title, or whether a number must be typed out completely.

Imagine how dull that debate will be if the writing style guide bores you. Because of the existence of a style guide, you may use it as a small writing rulebook without having to wait through disputes about blockquotes.

8. Typography

sütterlin, handwriting, typography

Typography is a visual component of your brand style guide that extends beyond the font used in your logo. It backs up anything from your blog design to your website’s links and copy — even your tagline.

Typography, the art, and skill of arranging and formatting text, is perhaps the most underappreciated area in web design.

Typography ensures that we can read and digest all of a website’s text-based content comfortably. We won’t even notice if a website’s typography is good. We’ll probably leave the page if it doesn’t work.

Every website has text, and there is either good or awful typography anywhere there is text. As a result, as a website owner, you must devote attention to your own site’s typography just as much as you devote it to the color palette and the tone of voice.

Your viewers will not be challenged by your material if you concentrate on its appearance and readability. Your attention to detail will communicate professionalism, empathy, and design smarts to the few who do appreciate fine typography for the brand guide.

Typography, in general, controls how text appears to the reader, or how the words appear on a page or screen.

It helps us focus on exactly the text we read on websites for our goals. This is due to the fact that web text best practices often differ from those for printed text, and there’s a lot more to consider online regarding brand style guides. So there you have some brand guidelines examples. Hope it helped you to see which brand elements you shall add. You can also get brand guidelines templates from the internet.

Conclusion

shaking hands, handshake, hands

No matter the type of business you’re in, you will probably have to include these brand guidelines in your brand style guide. It will help you maintain your brand identity.

Don’t forget to create a list of other brand collateral your brand style guide should cover – you might have to think deeper and answer a few more questions that are tightly related to your specific situation.

Rest assured that having a brand guide is how you will pave your way to success!

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