If you’re actively marketing your company across multiple platforms, it can sometimes be difficult to stay consistent with all of your messaging and visuals. It’s essential that no matter what content you produce, it always follows the same basic guidelines and parameters that align with your business’s unique branding strategy. To help ensure uniformity, consider creating a company-wide style guide.
Getting Started with a Style Guide for your Company
What is a Style Guide?
Style guides usually come in the form of PDFs and can vary in size depending on the different types of content your company uses for branding. One comprehensive document that encompasses a set of design standards ensures that your brand will have a consistent visual aesthetic to help improve communication.
Most style guides include even the most specific details for your branding like font size, spacing and positioning. However, it also contains important, big picture elements like:
- Logo specifications
- Color palette
- Typeface
- Layout examples
- Iconography
- Copy and tone of voice
- Do’s and don’ts
It’s crucial that you include all of these brand guidelines to keep the look and feel of your brand consistent no matter what type of media is used.
Save Time & Money
Writers and designers have creative positions that often come with a wide range of control and flexibility when it comes to content. However, this isn’t always the best idea when you’re trying to save time and money.
If your company outlines specific brand guidelines in an inclusive style guide, there will be less back and forth between yourself and the creative team when trying to determine how to present and produce your content efficiently. This will save you precious time that could be used on other projects.
There’s bound to be much less deviation when there’s a concrete plan in place for everyone to follow. A guide will also allow you to spend less time and money on training. Just make sure that it’s easily accessible so that any employee can effortlessly use it as a point of reference for their work, including new hires.
Unique Personalization
When your company has branded itself a certain way, your potential and current customers will have come to expect a certain quality of your content. This is why a guide is so important.
Your business has fans and followers because you conduct yourself a certain way. If their expectations aren’t met, you could compromise your brand’s integrity and risk losing loyal followers.
A style guide will help ensure that all written or visual content you publish across any platform will correspond with each other. In this case, you will never lose the essence that makes your brand so unique if your guide dictates how everything should look and feel.
Remember, there’s always going to be some creative control that you can expand on beyond the guide. Just make sure you never deviate from the standard requirements. This will help keep your brand consistent no matter where it shows up.
