What are Brand Guidelines?
Tell Your Brand Story. Consistently.
You’ve invested time, energy, and resources in to crafting your brand, and your brand’s identity. Yet, without the right direction, it can be a problem keeping consistency and quality in your brand’s content. Logos get misplaced, incorrect colors are used, and you can end up not only with off-brand messaging. When this happens, your brand identity suffers, and can result in a loss in your brand’s integrity.
A brand guideline, also known as a style guide, is how you describe your brand identity. It’s a toolkit for your company that helps you to always present your brand in a consistent, cohesive manner. A style guide helps you present your brand identity in a format that makes it easy to apply that identity to any content you create, whether print or digital. It helps you ensure that your always “on-brand” with your messaging.
Why You Need Brand Guidelines
Eliminate Confusion in your Brand Messaging.
The only thing more heartbreaking than a poorly designed brand identity, is a beautifully designed identity that is never used or used incorrectly. Maintaining quality and consistency in your brand’s content is a challenge, especially if you’re creating a large volume of content.
For a brand to breed trust with your audience, every single touch point needs to have the same rules in place – people don’t buy products or services for no reason, they make buying decisions based on an emotive connection. A brand style guide is the savior here—if it’s crafted the right way. In addition to internal clarity, your design and communications agencies will be perfectly aligned to save you time and ensure they understand you, your brand and your story.
What are the Benefits of Brand Guidelines?
Ensure Your Brand is Communicated Clearly and Consistently.
Everything that you create – should always point back to your brand. All of your content, including every print project, every blog post, every social media post – it all needs to represent your brand accurately.
Your style guide provides consistency in your content, but also benefits your brand in many ways:
- Quality Control: Having well-documented guidelines ensures that you’re always putting out content you’re proud of.
- Better Comprehension: Attention spans today require clear communication and good design, so that your content is clearly understood.
- Brand Recognition: You need to present a cohesive brand experience to your customers in order for them to recognize the value of your content – and your brand.
What Do Brand Guidelines Include?
It’s More than Just Design.
Your branding style guide is designed to help people understand how your brand looks and speaks. A typical set of brand guidelines includes:
- Your Brand’s Core Principles: Why the brand exists, what the brand vision is, what is the brand’s mission, and what are the brand values:
- Your Brand’s Verbal Identity: What is the brand essence, including what is the voice of the brand, it’s tone and personality. And what is the brand message, such as the tagline, value proposition, and what differentiates the brand.
- Your Brand’s Visual Identity: This includes the logo, colors, typography, and any additional elements that visually impact the brand’s identity.
Branding Guidelines from The Design Foundry
Let us create your comprehensive brand style guide!
At The Design Foundry, we are here to first listen to you and your requirements. We can help you develop your brand strategy, build your brand identity, and craft your brand story. And, once we understand the direction your brand is taking you, we can create branding guidelines that keep you on track.
We can help you develop your brand’s style guide that includes clear, easy-to-follow guidelines for every part of the brand identity, including examples and use-cases for print, web, video, and interactive elements. Once your brand guidelines are built, you can share them with the world so no matter who is telling your story, it’s told right, every time.
