How To Create A Style Guide For Your Brand In 2022?

Maintaining the quality and consistency of your brand is crucial. But how do you ensure consistency when various departments and partners produce large volumes of content for your brand?

Do you have any solution to quickly communicate your brand requirements with people across the company as you grow your business? Yes - a style guide for your brand!

A style guide is a simple documentation of your brand identity and branding guidelines. It is presented in a format to make the application of brand identity and following guidelines easier to maintain brand consistency. From your visual identity to your brand voice, it’s a tool to help you present a consistent brand to the world. If you want to learn how to create one for your brand, you’re at the right place.

In this blog, you’ll look at 6 simple steps to create a style guide for your brand that clearly outlines branding guidelines for your brand assets along with style guide examples.

Create A Style Guide for Your Brand in 6 Simple Steps

1. Research and Inspiration

Before you jump to laying out guidelines for your brand assets, you must research and find inspiration. Look at various branding style guide templates and brand guidelines templates, take inspiration from famous brands, note the ideas you liked the best and what has worked for them. Then you can ask the following questions for better output:

• What’s worked for your brand in the past?
• What do your competitive brands do that you like?
• What guidelines have you given repeatedly to your team in the past?

Keeping track of recurring directions related to branding visuals and voice to your writers and designers might be useful to highlight in your style guide.

2. Brand Guide Elements

Once you have done your research and have enough inspiration, ideas, and content, you can then start lining up your brand assets and branding guidelines for each one of them.

i. A Compelling Brand Story

A compelling brand story is what will drive your brand! So, you must start with the history of your brand. You can include:

• Where did you begin?
• What’s the origin of the brand name?
• How did you develop the brand?
• How did you manage to build a team?
• How did you reach where you are?

Things like these will help build interest and give your team a better understanding of your brand. You can further define and describe what your brand cares about and what emotions you want to convey to your customers. Finally, wrap it up in a short and effective package of the Purpose, Vision, Mission, Value of your brand. Remember, your brand’s story will inform the rest of the style guide.

ii. Verbal Identity

It’s not just the visual appearance of your brand that comes to mind. The verbal appearance of your brand strongly affects the audience’s perception of your brand. Hence, it is essential to lay out the branding guidelines for the voice, tone and the personality of your brand. Ask yourself, if your brand were a person, would it speak informally with slang and humor, or would it be uptight and serious? You can then define specific guidelines for messaging across all the platforms, the tone for verbal communication with customers (sales calls), communication style across all the media, and a list of words and phrases you want your team to avoid using. Check out Gusto’s brand guide as one of the excellent style guide examples for voice and tone philosophy.

To help your team maintain consistency, you can include do’s and don’ts for grammar, punctuation, spellings, vocabulary, and tone to use while messaging. This ensures consistent messaging across all the social and digital platforms. If your brand especially coined a few words, include a dictionary for the same in your style guide. For example, the term “YouTuber” wasn’t intentionally created by Youtube, but it became synonymous with their popular culture. So it is better to explain such terms and include guidelines and examples for using them.

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