Last updated on August 10th, 2021 at 05:08 pm
How to design branding guidelines for business?
Style guide or brand guidelines are framework of how a brand is presented to the public. It can be in the digital sense and physical sense. Branding guidelines let designers, photographers, and everyone involved with the company know how the different aspects of the brand is handled. It keeps all interactions – social media, website, print, advertising, designs consistent and recognizable.
Here the branding guide will specify all the different sizes of logo usages for web, print. It will usually consists of a large, medium and small logo size as options. It will also include the minimum white / clear space around the logo, to maintain a certain look and feel of the logo at all times.
All the typefaces used by all the company communications, including website, printed publication, marketing materials, banners, billboards, social media sites, are specified here. All the variations of the fonts are listed here, and the types of usage is documented.
The color palette is essential to keeping the brand together, there can be several sets of color palette for a brand, specified in Pantone, CMYK, RGB and any other color system that can be used by the company.
Does your company have a certain style of images for website? What are the sources of the photographs? Are illustrations or cliparts acceptable? These are the questions that need to be answered in the image guidelines. The tones, contrasts, hues of the images and how they should be processed and edited should be documented in this section as well.
A consistent writing style in copy will give customers a sense of brand. Define your target audience, and your tone. Should it be simple, wordy, casual or formal? Give examples of words that are acceptable and those that are not.
Style guides are an important steps for all companies and it ensures consistency of the brand presence. It benefits all businesses, big and small. It may take sometime to decide all the details but it allows you to really think about how your want your company to be perceived.
