Creating consistency in your brand messaging in key to developing the business personality you want to use to interact with your customers.

We've already given you all the reasons why your business really ought to have a style guide. So now we've convinced you of that, here's what to put in it.

Remember when putting together your style guide that designers are visual creatures, so giving lots of examples and using visuals, rather than excessive text, to illustrate what you want will likely be most successful. Also, the whole document should be considered as a long-term brand strategy – after all, its whole point is to create that consistency, so changing it every six months kind of defeats the purpose.

That doesn't mean make it and never edit it again. As your business evolves, you'll come across situations and questions you never considered early on. Make sure decisions get made on these and added to the style guide.

Review it once a year or if your company has undergone significant change recently.

Now the admin stuff is out of the way, there's a lot of ground to cover, so let's get to what to put in your style guide.

Brand overview

Your style guide is essentially your visual bible. By starting off with an overview of the brand and what it seeks to achieve, a lot of the more nitty-gritty requirements later on will make more sense. Things like mission statements, values, directions and even key metrics could be useful for a designer unfamiliar with the brand. They will be using these style guidelines to best represent what you stand for.

Logo

What are the proper dimensions and colors for your logo? Where should it be placed on a website, letter or product packaging? How much space needs to be left around it? How much scope do designers have to play with it? Are seasonal variations okay, like Google creates? Or maybe different color schemes? Do you have different applications for your logomark and logotype?

Your logo is the most important component of your brand's visual identity. Make sure it gets used exactly as you want it to. Failure to do so will be confusing for customers and could waste the quality of the design asset you have to hand.

Colors

Think about which colors you use to represent your brand. Do you have different color schemes for different types of content, products or purposes? Do you use gradients or solid tones only? Is there scope to play with different variations? Be sure to list specific RGB and CMYK values for your brand colors, and check manually that they match.

You will save your designer time trying to find an appropriate color, and take away the risk of subtle variations, which can be distracting and can cause a significant drop off in the visual balance of your material.

Fonts

How should your written communications look? What fonts do you use for headings, subheadings, calls to action? This is the place where you specify every aspect of how your company looks on the page, be it digital or paper.

Be sure to not only specify font usage and sizes, but also specifics on leading, tracking and kerning, to ensure visual consistency is achieved every single time.

Imagery and Photography

If creating or sourcing imagery for your designs, what are your preferences? Flat designs in specific color schemes? Edgy or elegant? High-res photography in front of plain backgrounds? Close-ups or landscapes? Where will images sit on a page, and what size and format should they be in? How many images are too many?

With stock photo websites containing millions of pictures, you can help the designer by narrowing the search options so they deliver consistent imagery.

Web-specific elements

You could probably fill a whole separate book with your brand's web requirements, but some of the most important ones to cover are things like button hierarchies (which are the most important buttons, when and how often should they be used, where should they lead?), layouts and grids, and basic coding specifications, like how and what to link.

Keep in mind that this article only covers requirements for a style guide for visual branding purposes. If your company relies heavily on written communications you might want to consider creating a separate document around questions of spelling, grammar and expressions. The HubSpot Blog offers a brilliant article on how to go about that for web-oriented written content.

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Written by Jane Murray on Wednesday, December 2, 2015

Jane Murray is a freelance copywriter based in Sydney. Apart from writing up a storm for the DesignCrowd blog on anything from logo design to Michael Jackson's shoes, she enjoys reading literary science fiction and hanging out with most animals except wasps. Get in touch via LinkedIn.