The Importance of a Branding Style Guide
Are you using a style guide to maintain consistency with your brand? Why not? Chances are if you do not follow the guidelines of a style guide for your business, your brand is suffering. A style guide sets the rules for how your brand is presented to consumers. If you are not following some sort of guidelines, your brand will lack consistency, and in turn, not perform at its full potential. Translation… You will miss out on potential income growth. One of the major keys to a successful business, is a successful brand. One of the major keys to a successful brand is consistency. A style guide is one of the most important tools you will receive from a branding package from Skilled Graphics.
Skilled Graphics recently created an updated style guide for our own brand. Even though we know what our brand is and how it should be presented, it really helps to have a guide to refer to. A style guide is a nice reminder of what your business represents. Every business and even its employees should refer to this guide, as it explains how they should present themselves as employees, just as much as the business itself. Your employees and associates are all a part of your brand, and they should present themselves in line with it. Most style guides have some kind of mission statement or introduction that gives you a basic understanding of the essence of the brand.
Your style guide can also explain the thought porocess, important or even hidden reasoning behind your logos deisgn process.
Your style guide will express certain rules as to how your logo should be displayed. These rules are in place to optimize the brands effectiveness. For example there are rules to prevent the logo from being reduced in size to a point where the mark or text is not legible. There are rules in place to prevent the distortion of the logo. There are even rules in place that define the minimum amount of space that should be between your logo and another object. These rules may seem tedious and unnecessary, but they are extremely important to the consistency of your brand. And again, your brands consistency is extremely important to your brands success.
There are several different types of guidelines within the style guide that aim to keep your brand at the top of its potential. The style guide is not just for a business and its employees, but for anyone that is using elements of the businesses brand. This goes for advertisers, marketers, publicists, and designers. A style guide makes keeping your brands consistency as easy as sending an email.
It is important that your logo is displayed as ledgibly as possible when being placed on imagery. A style guide helps express how that should be done.
One of my favorite parts of a style guide, is the color scheme. This part of the style guide makes certain you are using the right colors on everything related to your brand. From print materials to your website, this is one of the most useful parts of a style guide.
Another good use of a style guide is to define what backgrounds or patterns are appropriate to use.
There are many other elements that can be added to a style guide. Rules for your website, social media, language, stationary, and pretty much any aspect of your business. The style guide will make sure that your brand is represented in everything your brand is connected to. This will keep your brand consistent and successful. A consistent brand is much easier to remember than an inconsistent brand.
Your brand is like a phone number. If you interact with the same number over and over, you will eventually remember that phone number. However if that number changes every other week, you will never remember that number. The idea behind a consistent brand is that it can be easily remembered. The more consistent the brand the easier it will be.
If your business is not properly branded, it is a fact that it will cost you revenue. You don’t have to believe me, just look at every largely successful company in the world and have a look at what they spend in branding. Businesses can literally spend millions to make sure their branding is top notch. These businesses make that money back in no time at all.
I’m not a huge business, I don’t have dozens of designers working for me, I do not have the overhead that these larger design agencies have. For that reason I won’t charge you millions, I won’t even charge you hundreds of thousands, but I will create an amazing brand that will lead your business to the success you are seeking. If you are interested in a quote, you can click right here, or click the email icon on the top menu area. I will get back to within 24 hours with a custom quote just for you. Are you ready to soar?
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