How to Create a Frontify Style Guide
Brand books, brand manuals, or Style Guides — call it what you want. The Frontify Style Guide truly is the best practice for building brand guidelines. We provide you with the tools to stay brand consistent — no matter if you’re a freelancer, an agency, or handling a multi-billion dollar company.
Why should you have a Style Guide?
✓ Brand consistency supports brand recognition across all channels.
✓ Vital place for employees, internal and external, to find brand information.
✓ Base in which you represent your CI, values, and all other brand definitions.So why should you have an «online» Style Guide?
Everyone could use some uncomplicated, cloud-based guidelines to streamline their brand — bridging the gap between designers and developers. It’ll allow you to be constantly up to date, getting rid of painful PDF Style Guides and compressed imagery files. It streamlines your whole production — allowing every person involved to access brand guidelines from one centralized place.
Now, let me show you how easy and uncomplicated it is to create a Style Guide in line with your brand, using templates and pre-defined content blocks.
1. If you’re not yet on Frontify — make sure to sign up.
Sign up for Frontify. We offer 14 days of free trial for you to get a feeling of the software. Don’t worry! There are no obligations connected. No credit cards. No nothing. Sign up, and let your inner designer thrive.
2. Enter the Frontify App, and start shaping your brand.
Open your account; you’ll now see your brand overview for the first time. Push the “Create Brand” button. From here, you’ll be able to define your brand’s name and its primary brand color.
3. Choose the base of your Style Guide — templated or blank.
Push the “Create Style Guide” button. Decide to either start from scratch, using a Blank Style Guide. Or choose a structure including tailor made templates of commonly used content blocks, such as logos, colors, typography, and icons.
4. Build your Style Guide in accordance with your brand.
Now, this is where the magic happens. Take out your wand. Put on your silly wizard hat, and let the fun begin. If you’ve chosen to work with templates, like we’ve done below, a lot of the blocks will already exist inside your structure — simply fill them in. If you start from scratch, you’ll be able to build the whole structure up by adding desired content blocks, using the blue plus symbols.
There’s a broad range of different blocks to choose from, helping you create beautiful guidelines. The drop-down menu will segment them into the most used ones, basics, or in more detailed categories.
5. Use pages to create an exciting structure.
Use pages, and sub-pages, to define different categories for your brand guidelines. You could, for example, use one page for basics, one for visual language, and one for communications (check out our own Style Guide for inspiration). This will further assist you in maintaining an overview, simplifying the extraction of pinpointed information.
6. Shape your brand guidelines as you see fit.
Customize your own visual appearance, such as headers and other general layouts. Try some different things and see what works for you. The key here is consistency. Just make sure that you present detailed information about how to use your brand. As long as your guidelines are clear and to-the-point, you and your concerned co-workers can use them in all productions touching your brand, ensuring a consistent brand with always up-to-date brand material and a highly accessible cloud-based point of resources.
Congratulations! You’ve now taken the first steps in the journey towards a more consistent brand.
But wait, there’s more.
There are loads of other features for your Style Guide, such as:
✓ Offline and print: Define how collaterals, stationery ads, merchandise, signage or other marketing materials should look like.
✓ Sharing is caring: We’ve made it easy to share your Style Guide with your internal and external teams.
✓ Become addicted to constant and never-ending improvements: Continous add-ons, new features, bug fixes, and much more.
STOP. There’s even more.
I know, I know, I know.
You can also add more essential tools to your Style Guide.
Connect your brand to a variety of other tools at Frontify;
We‘ll enable you to collaborate on design, create reusable code snippets, build a media library, or even create an extensive home of your brand.
You’ll learn to love all of them.
Frontify offers scalable solutions
It doesn’t really matter if you’re a freelancer or the Head of Brand in a fortune 500 company — we scale our software in a matter that truly fits your company size.
Check out the different plans we offer — I’m sure you’ll find one for you.
Additionally, for Agencies and Enterprises, we offer some special services.
Thank you for taking the time to learn more about Frontify Style Guides, if you have any other questions, don’t hesitate to say hello@frontify.com.
