This complete guide to creating brand guidelines offers instructions and inspirational examples to help you create a powerful brand style guide.
Offering a unified vision of how a brand identity should be put into practice, a brand style guide is an essential tool for any growing business, helping to maintain the consistency of branding whether designs are being created by employees in-house, or by consultants or freelancers external to the business.
In this ultimate guide to creating a brand style guide, you’ll learn what should be included in a brand guidelines document, how to create a brand style guide, plus discover 10 inspirational examples of beautiful brand guidelines to help you create your own.
Table of Contents
License this image via Andrew Sotnikow.
What Is a Brand Style Guide?
A brand style guide is a digital or physical document that sets out the elements included in a brand identity, along with rules on how to use these elements to create designs and communications under the business’ name.
These visual elements will include at a basic level the company logo, icons, color palette, and fonts, and may also include guidance for typography, as well as a photographic style and illustration style that remains consistent with the business’ branding.
A style guide, also known as a brand guidelines document or brand book, may also include information about the company’s core values and mission statement, plus guidance on writing style and tone of voice.
A brand style guide is a digital or physical document that sets out the elements included in a brand identity, along with rules on how to use these elements to create designs and communications under the business’ name.
Once you’ve read up on the business’ brand style guide, you should (in theory) be able to create any design or communication material across any medium, such as digital, print, or merchandise, with branding that will appear consistent with other media produced by other individuals in or external to the business.
The style guides for, clockwise from top-left, the MIT Museum, Young V&A, and Uber.
Why Is a Brand Style Guide Important?
A brand style guide, or brand guidelines, acts as a rulebook for using a brand identity across different media and designs. The main aim of a brand style guide is to promote consistency, so that if someone unfamiliar with the brand identity was to use it, they would be able to create a design or marketing communication that would appear consistent with designs created by the business’ in-house design team.
While many companies only create brand guidelines when they grow to a larger number of employees and contractors, it’s wise to create a brand style guide at the outset of using a brand identity. This allows everyone to be on the same page, and the media output of the business will be much more consistent and effective as a result.
Consistent brands are stronger brands, and a brand style guide helps to create and maintain a high level of branding consistency.
The importance of having a brand style guide lies in the details of usage that wouldn’t otherwise be known by simply having access to all the brand elements.
For example, guidance on logo usage helps individuals to know where and how the logo can be placed on a design, ensuring the branding is communicated effectively and consistently to the target audience.
Why Is Consistency Important in Branding?
Branding consistency is essential for building brand recognition and eventually customer trust. If marketing materials and products display a logo in various ways, or in the context of a variety of different color schemes, for example, this can lead to erosion of brand trust.
A lack of brand consistency may even lead to customers thinking that a product is counterfeit or faulty.
Consistent brands are stronger brands, and a brand style guide helps to create and maintain a high level of branding consistency.
Consistency and repetition are the foundation of a strong brand identity, and should be emphasized as much as possible within the style guide.
How to Establish a Strong Visual Identity
Brand guidelines include examples of the design elements in action, alone, and as part of sample designs, in order to establish a strong visual identity for the viewer. This may be as simple as demonstrating color variations or the minimum size of logos, or can extend to smaller visual details, such as email signature color or the use of icon designs on the business’ website.
It is also important for a brand style guide to include examples of how the brand elements should not be used, such as demonstrating the logo design placed against a busy background, or an undesirable format for staff photography.
By demonstrating a bank of good and bad examples of the branding in use, you will establish a clear visual identity that can be used as a benchmark of brand quality going forward.
How to Enhance Brand Recognition and Recall
Why should you really bother with creating a brand style guide? Well, aside from allowing the members of a business to create consistent marketing materials, a thorough brand book actually enhances brand recognition and brand recall in your consumer audience.
Imagine being shown a number of illustrations of a bear, each with slight variations. They’re all pretty much the same bear, right? Sure, but the brain has to work harder to remember the details of each bear illustration when there are variations.
The harder our brain has to work to recall the bear’s variations, the more likely we are to forget other details about it. In fact, the more consistent the bear is, the more likely we are to remember it and accurately recall it.
We are also more likely to remember anything else that accompanied it, such as a business name or a marketing message.
The more consistent the elements of a brand identity are, and the more consistently we use these brand elements in designs, the more likely we are to boost brand recognition and brand recall.
So, the more specific you can be with the details of using brand elements in a brand style guide, the more memorable your branding will become! It’s a win-win.
Which trio of bears is most memorable? By improving the consistency of every element of a brand identity, and promoting this in a brand style guide, you can hugely enhance brand recognition and recall. License this image via ABC vector.
What Are the Key Components of a Brand Style Guide?
What should be included in a brand style guide? Along with logo usage, typography guidance, and photography and illustration guidance, there are two areas that can and should be covered as part of a style guide—tone of voice and the brand color palette.
1. Tone of Voice
When you think of brand guidelines, you probably first think of visual elements, such as logo, fonts, and color (see below). However, some of the most successful brand style guides also take into account the consistency of written and oral communication by including guidance on tone of voice.
Email marketing platform Mailchimp includes guidance on voice and tone in their brand guidelines, emphasizing the importance of using genuine, plainspoken, and clear language, as well as maintaining a dry sense of humor.
With this company’s brand built on online communication, it is paramount for Mailchimp to ensure that all of their employees share a particular tone of voice and communication attitude in order to give the impression of consistency and clarity across all of their communications with customers.
While Mailchimp urges their employees to use an active voice, which inspires a (positive) sense of urgency and allows their customer service to appear direct and present, other brands may opt for a passive voice in their own guidelines, or turn to other communication styles and strategies, such as using a formal or informal tone, compassionate or emotional voice, or even something a little off-beat, such as comical surrealism or casual humor.
2. Color Palette
One of the key components that should be included in a brand style guide is the brand color palette.
Display a deck of the brand color swatches with their corresponding color codes. Include RGB and HEX codes for use online and on social media, CMYK values for print designs, and PANTONE for spot color swatches for printing and product design.
Some brands will also divide the brand color palette into subgroups, which may include core colors (used across the majority of output), secondary colors (used for accents, seasonal materials, or sister brands), and supporting social media colors (which may include a higher number of swatches for more diversity on platforms such as Instagram and TikTok).
You may also want to include examples of color combinations in use, in order to demonstrate adequate contrast and to advise on how the colors can be used as part of the background, logo, graphics, photography, and illustration.
The style guide for pet food brand Whisker details a clear color swatch deck, with RGB and HEX code values, and memorable color names.
How to Create a Brand Style Guide
Most brand style guides are created using publishing software, such as Adobe InDesign, and exported as PDF documents that can be printed and distributed to employees and contractors, or shared as a digital document over email.
Some businesses may also choose to host their brand guidelines as an internal website that can be accessed via a login.
Unless you’re an expert with Adobe InDesign, using a brand guidelines template—like the Brand Starter Kit from InDesignSkills—is a good place to start for creating your own style guide.
You can then simply drop your own logos and brand imagery into the style guide template, and create additional pages as and when required.
Common Mistakes When Creating a Brand Style Guide
Brand style guides are meant to be helpful and by avoiding a few common pitfalls, you can create a style guide that communicates your branding clearly and stylishly.
- First, avoid creating a huge brand guidelines document that is difficult to navigate. Include a table of contents and condense information into a maximum of 20-30 pages. Anything longer and you risk readers not finishing the guidelines, or being too overwhelmed with the sheer volume of information.
- Second, try to avoid the mistake of not providing enough visual examples of the brand identity in action. Providing sample designs or product mockups featuring the branding in both correct and incorrect formats is often much more helpful than text alone.
- Finally, try to steer clear of creating a dreadfully dull manual. Instead, inject your style guide with energy and fun! Using branding is meant to be enjoyable and creative, but sometimes employees can be too frightened to use brand assets when a brand manual is too restrictive or cautionary. Your style guide should be about encouraging readers to use the branding and flex their creativity. So, try to include plenty of helpful visual examples, positive language, and aim to give the style guide a real sense of the business’ personality.
10 Examples of Brand Style Guides to Inspire
Now that you know what should be included in a brand style guide, get ready to drool over these 10 inspiring examples of brand books.
Providing style guide inspiration through stylish design and effective visual language, these brands have all created brand guidelines that stand as excellent examples of branding projects.
1. Netflix
Streaming giant Netflix has an online brand style guide that demonstrates how their cinematic red logo can be used in the context of online designs and marketing materials.
As Netflix is an online service in the video industry, it makes sense that the brand hosts their guidelines online, allowing them to also demonstrate examples of the branding in the context of video, animation, and sound.
2. MIT Museum
Renowned design agency Pentagram’s new brand identity for the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Museum is a lesson in the power of a simple brand style guide.
Featuring plenty of negative space and clear visual examples, this simple style guide nonetheless still feels fun and energized.
A simple ringbound style guide is the perfect fit for this retro-infused brand.
3. NASA
The visual identity of the NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) is one of the most recognizable and distinctive in the world. The brand identity has remained mostly the same over the decades, a testament to its strong design bones and nostalgic pull.
You can see the 1976 version of NASA’s 60-page brand manual, designed by Danne & Blackburn, here.
Today, NASA still uses the 1959-designed Insignia (affectionately termed the “Meatball”) as an official identifier, alongside a supporting NASA Logotype (the “Worm”).
The extensive online brand guidelines for NASA aim to set out the use for both of these brand elements, and demonstrate how they can be applied to print and online materials, vehicle wraps, and, yes, rockets.
NASA’s Insignia (the “Meatball”) is shown with clear margins and spacing.
4. The Guardian
A masterclass in communicating digital brand design, the online brand guide for newspaper The Guardian balances playful elements that keep the reader engaged with clear infographic-style imagery demonstrating exactly how brand elements should be arranged on the newspaper’s website grid.
5. Sonos
If you have a brand with a more minimal aesthetic, the refreshed brand guidelines of audio product manufacturer Sonos serves as an elegant style guide.
The simple brand style guide features soothing nature-inspired colors, line illustrations, and plenty of negative space, helping carve out a subtly stylish niche for the brand that contrasts with the louder, brighter branding of its rivals.
Plenty of visual examples, situating the brand elements as part of poster and product mockups, helps the reader to see Sonos’ brand identity in action.
6. Hinge
Dating app Hinge is in a highly competitive market, but they have two things helping them to carve a unique niche online.
First, they enlisted the help of agency Red Antler to reimagine Hinge’s brand position as an app that is meant to be deleted once people find true love. Hingie, an anthropomorphic version of the app icon who meets its demise every time a couple hits it off, plays a central role in the brand’s advertising and brand identity.
Second, Hinge did a deep dive into reasserting its core values, which can be read on its mission statement page. The resulting 114 page document (yes, really) is a standalone brand guide that solely focuses on what the company wants to be, and how they want to communicate with customers.
For brands looking to focus on their brand values and communication strategies, Hinge’s non-visual style guide is a comprehensive example of how to present guidance for written content.
7. Fuller
Designer Sean Kane crafted a striking yet simple brand style guide for communication agency Fuller. Inspired by Swiss Style graphic design, the brand book has a clean aesthetic, with clearly defined layouts and negative space, in a limited palette of violet, black, and white.
This is an exercise in unpretentious and effective brand guidelines design, with a no-frills approach that works beautifully for this polished yet minimal brand identity.
The style guide details how the logotype, icon, and supporting icon designs should be used.
8. Young V&A
The second brand guidelines taken from agency Pentagram on our list, the quirky and colorful style guide for Young V&A is a great example of how to make a style guide feel fresh and fun.
The Victoria & Albert Museum opened a sister museum in Bethnal Green, London, in 1974, originally named the V&A Museum of Childhood. To attract a diverse (and young) crowd, the revised brand identity is vibrant, playful, and imbued with a spirit of mischief.
Because a museum is a physical space, involving signage, merchandise, and video displays, as well as an online presence on websites and social media, Pentagram’s brand style guide includes a huge variety of mock-ups, such as clothing, exhibition displays, and even skateboard art.
Showing this wide range of brand applications helps the style guide to feel exceptionally creative and exciting.
A range of fun visual examples help to situate the brand identity in the real world.
9. Whisker
The retro-infused brand identity for Whisker pet food, created by Shuttledot Studio, is brought to colorful life in the brand’s style guide.
An informative deck of color swatches helps readers to understand the importance and hierarchy of color in the brand identity, and visual examples of the branding in use on products, posters, and marketing imagery clearly shows how photography styles, typography, color, and logo can be brought together to create a consistent brand style.
The exact color swatches used in the brand identity are detailed fully for ease of use.
10. Uber
Looking for ultimate style guide inspiration? Transportation company Uber has a super slick brand style guide, formulated by agencies Wolf Ollins and Frontify, that showcases every conceivable aspect of the popular app’s brand identity as it drives forward into the future.
Going in line with a new logo design that features a custom typeface, Uber Move—inspired by international road signage—the refreshed brand style guide is lengthy yet absorbing, providing examples of the typography and minimal monochrome color palette in advertising, vehicle wraps, and on app interfaces.
Uber’s new style guide is a real masterclass in building a comprehensive brand book.
In Uber’s revised brand identity, the logo type is made distinctive from the brand’s “U-frame.”
The simplicity of the logo and colors are demonstrated with animations and screenshot app examples.
Conclusion: Creating Brand Style Guides with Serious Style
As much as a style guide is just that, a guide on how to put a brand identity into practice, it is also an opportunity to really showcase the personality of a brand, and present opportunities for creativity while working within the branding.
While promoting brand consistency is the paramount aim of a brand book, there’s no need for it to be dull! You can use beautiful layout styles, immersive visual examples, and helpful navigation to make your brand guidelines a pleasure to read.
Start your own style guide design with a brand guidelines template, and you’ll soon see results through improved customer trust and brand recognition.
So, what are you waiting for? Get started on a style guide today!
License this cover image via Andrew Sotnikow.
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