Member-only story
Your Brand Needs a Style Guide
Presentation can make or break your brand, so make a style guide already
Style guides — a document outlining how your brand presents itself through visuals, words, formatting, tone, and more — are very important to maintaining a consistent and recognisable image.
They are also kind of daunting, and very easy to do badly.
A good style guide is two things:
- Easy to understand and follow, and
- No more complicated than it should be.
Beyond that, it can be organised however suits you best. However, that would make for a terribly unhelpful post to read, so here are a few distinct points you should decided about and adhere to. These points are in no particular order — they are all important.
For the sake of illustrating my points, I’m going to work through this for a fictional (and moderately funny, at least for my sense of humour) company. Let’s pretend I want to open a garden store for nudists called Green Thumbs and Bare Bums.
Font
Pick a font (or three). Broadly speaking you should have a universal, easy to read font such as Calibri or Times New Roman to use for the majority of written communications from your brand — your website, emails…