7 Breathtaking Brand Style Guide examples to inspire you [+ Template]

Published in

marketing-and-branding

4 min readJan 4, 2021

What do all great brands have in common? They are instantly recognizable. Recognizable brands don’t always need to incorporate their name in a logo. Here’s the proof:

However, a great logo isn’t enough to become instantly recognizable. Recognizability is achieved through continuous, consistent branding across all communication channels.

Why you need consistent branding

Consistent branding leaves no room for confusion when it comes to brand communications. It means using the same logo, brand colors, fonts, imagery, and tone of voice, whether it’s a social media post or a PowerPoint presentation.

How to achieve consistency

In order to protect the brand, companies invest in a brand style guide. A brand style guide contains the correct logos, fonts, colors as well as the core values of the brand.

Brand consistency requires the entire company to fully understand and implement the brand guidelines in all internal and external communications.

The more detailed the brand style guide, the less room it leaves for inconsistency. You can go as far as describing the spacing between the lines of a written document.

A brand style guide should contain at least:

Brand mission and vision
The brand logo
Color palette
Typography

Here’s something that can help you determine other aspects of your brand personality:

How to get everyone on board and achieve brand constistency

Enforcing brand guidelines isn’t easy. Make the brand style guide easily accessible to everyone. With easy access, people will be less likely to Google your logo or use a random text font next time they are making a PowerPoint presentation.

You could also provide templates for presentations, proposals, business cards and other MarCom materials. With templates, people will be working within an approved, on-brand framework.

You might also find interesting:

Top examples of awesome brand style guides

1. LinkedIn

LinkedIn has a clean and straight-forward web page that divides all components of the brand book into .zip files. You can download these files separately or you can download the complete brand book.

2. Red Cross

Red Cross keeps it short and sweet. Their brand poster tells you everything you need to know about Red Cross brand in a PDF.

3. Santa

Although Santa is technically not a brand, *Santa*’s brand book is a clever example of keeping things playful. This brand book is an initiative of the Quietroom.

4. Coca-Cola

Arguably the most recognizable brand in the world. From industrial design principles for equipment to overall proportions of the bottles, Coca-Cola’s brand book does not leave any room for misinterpretations.

5. MailChimp

Check out the section uniquely describing the tone of voice of the brand.

6. Cisco’s Interactive Style Guide

Cisco has decided to create an interactive Brand Style Guide to really showcase their brand. There are multiple ways you could do this, if you would like to go that route and there are many benefits of having an interactive brand style guide.

You could, for instance, use Lytho’s Brand Center to create an interactive brand style guide. This allows all stakeholders (internal and external) to access the style guide everywhere and download logos, font, and other assets directly from within Lytho.

Creating your style guide in Lytho’s Brand Center, also means that everyone is always accessing the latest version. You won’t need to worry about people using an old version that they have downloaded years ago and isn’t up to date anymore.

When conducting our research for this article, we came across multiple outdated versions of Apple’s affiliate style guide. These outdated versions can easily lead to inconsistency in Apple’s brand efforts.

7. Apple’s Style Guide for Channel Affiliates

Having so many resellers, Apple opted for a brand style guide to let all stakeholders know how to use their brand appropriately. Imagine having so many partners and no guidelines. The great Apple brand could just not remain consistent.