Graphics & Design

Q: What to include in a brand style guide ?

In a Brand Style Guide, You should include: Brand Heart: This is essentially a summary of your brand's guiding ideals, which can affect everything from how you communicate with clients to how you create websites. It consists of the reason you are here; the kind of future you want to contribute; the design and the tenets that govern actions. Verbal identity: this is what you say about your business, how you explain your goods, how you interact with consumers, etc. Including Messaging (Tagline, Value Proposition, Messaging Pillars/Differentiators); Brand Essence (Voice, Tone, Personality) Visual Identity: this is about Logo, Colors, Typography, Additional elements (if needed), Photography, Illustration, Iconography, Data visualization

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Brand Style Guides FAQs

What are the 6 essential elements of a brand style guide? / What is contained in an organisational style guide?

Elements in your business’s brand guideline can be varied depending on your business type and need; however, these are 6 fundamental Brand Style Guide elements that play their roles like your Brand Style Guides' genetic code that help you in building your identity and differentiate your business among many others in the industry:

Brand Story: An interesting brand story makes people understand your product, remember your brand, and want to connect with you. Your brand story plays a more important role than just an element of the brand style guideline since it gives the foundation to develop other elements later on.
Brand Logo: A unique and recognizable logo is the visual representative of a business that helps much in branding and marketing strategy.
The Color Scheme: Findings from countless research studies have shown that people recognize a brand based on the color scheme more easily and quickly than any other parts of the visual appearance. Defending the most suitable color scheme for your business plays an essential role in your branding strategy.
The Fonts/Typography: The typo expresses a brand characteristics thanks to the line, feature, and unique shape it draws out. Looking for other famous brands and seeing what they have in their fonts/typo, every business has their own font that best suits their feeling and mood.
Image guideline: A good image guideline helps to evoke the feeling you want your target customers to feel of your brand. What can be included in your brand image guideline? What do you want people to think of when heard about you? And so on.
The tone of voice: Your brand tone delivers a pleasant hearing experience to people and has a huge impact on your brand overall image. Whether you want it to be funny or serious, soft or tough, formal or casual, etc. choose for your brand a unique tone of voice so that they can easily remember you later on.

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What are the 4 steps of branding?

There are. In Brand Style Guides, you can adhere to these 4 steps of branding if you are responsible for creating your business's brand:

Identify the people you want to reach.
Placement of your company and goods.
Describe the character of your business.
Decide on a catchphrase and a logo.

The public will more readily recognize a company's products or services if it develops an engaging and memorable brand, and they will be aware of the value that the items may contribute to their lives. One of the best methods to win clients' trust is through branding.

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What is a brand style guide? / What is in a style guide?

A brand style guide is a digital handbook that details every element of your business's appearance and tone. A brand style guide is sent to partners, the media, and advertising agencies in addition to being utilized internally to inform them of the right and consistent ways to represent your brand.

Shared via email attachments is not a good idea for your brand style guide. Learn how to protect your brand identity to a whole new level by adopting dynamic, easy-shared online brand standards.

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What to include in a brand style guide ?

In a Brand Style Guide, You should include:

Brand Heart: This is essentially a summary of your brand's guiding ideals, which can affect everything from how you communicate with clients to how you create websites. It consists of the reason you are here; the kind of future you want to contribute; the design and the tenets that govern actions.
Verbal identity: this is what you say about your business, how you explain your goods, how you interact with consumers, etc. Including Messaging (Tagline, Value Proposition, Messaging Pillars/Differentiators); Brand Essence (Voice, Tone, Personality)
Visual Identity: this is about Logo, Colors, Typography, Additional elements (if needed), Photography, Illustration, Iconography, Data visualization

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How much to charge for a brand style guide?

To count a charge of Brand Style Guide. Depending on the graphic designer you select, the price of a brand style guide might range from $60 to $350. It is worthwhile to invest in a high-quality brand style guide to ensure brand consistency across all of your messaging platforms because developing brand guidelines for your business involves a designer performing market research and learning about your company and brand details.

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Brand style guides made simple - What they are and why they matter

Want to get out of a rut? It is time to take your business up a notch with a template that outlines brand style guides for typography, logo usage, and more. From a host of benefits to elements of a style guide, papmall® got your back, no matter what aspect of the brand communications style guide you want to grasp.

Get to know about brand style guides

A brand style guide is a manual that outlines how a company should promote itself to the public, including logo, font, color choices, photography, and other design elements. It ensures consistency in your visual presence, which is critical to success.

Need a starting point? Then keep on reading to dip your toe in the brand style world!

Understand the benefits brand style guides bring to your business.

Personality: Define and protect your brand personality so that it can stand out in a crowd.
Recognition: Help to build market recognition for your brand and offer clear communication from end to end.
Value: Companies with a strong brand identity are perceived to hold more value than those that have yet to find their niche.
Engagement: Customers will recognize your brand for its quality and integrity, which will increase new acquisitions.
Brand voice: A corporate design style guide will help you keep the tone of your communication and messages consistent.

Main characteristics of brand style guides

Accessible

Employees from all levels of your organization need to know the brand personality inside out, which only happens when brand style guides are put out into the world to keep everyone on the same page regarding corporate identity.

Plus, the ease of access to brand style guidelines will help to reinforce inclusivity as a core value and shows your efforts to overcome organizational resistance to accessibility.

As you progress, you may need to decide whether to publicize or internally circulate your brand identity. When people can obtain the style guide with a single click, they will know what to tell others about the brand, but it can also break your business as you can lose the whole concept to a bigger fish in the sea.

Consistent

People come and go, but brand style guides should be here to stay. If every employee adheres to brand guidelines, everything newly created to elaborate on those released in the past will keep your brand alive in the hearts and minds of customers.

At some point, your team will be bored of the repetition of the same logo, fonts, colors, and images. It is essential to let them understand although they may have seen the company logo a million times, your potential customer is only starting to notice it.

If consistency is easy to be archived, everyone will nail it, so help your team see that the more consistency cultivated, the more weight your brand will carry over time.

Intentional

While brand style guidelines should be put in front of more eyeballs, keep in mind that your primary objective is prospective customers - the people who make purchase decisions.

Leave rooms in your style guide to remind everyone of the powerful connection between your brand, your solution, and your customer. This intentionality will quiet many voices and improve your focus on the main thing.

When employees see where the company is coming from, they will have a higher purpose, even a growing passion for living the brand vision.

Flexible

There is much-unexpected importance of versatility following the pandemic outbreak. It is now more than ever necessary to allow for some flexibility in the way we devise a branding and style guide.

To avoid falling through the cracks during turbulent times, you should have multiple ways to express your brand under your belt to accommodate a variety of challenges.

When considering your brand voice guidelines, it is advisable to use guiding principles in opposition to specific words.

If your brand guidelines can adapt to unexpected changes quickly, your team is more likely to stick to them over time because they won't have to be broken to meet a new set of criteria.

Scalable

Your brand will continue growing as your business matures, and for this reason, corporate identity is not a one-and-done effort. If you hire an agency, make sure they produce brand style guides that can be adapted to meet greater needs in the future.

Make a habit of auditing, assessing, updating, and adding to your guidelines on a quarterly or annual basis. And as the use cases, people, and problems you encounter change over time, it is important to review your brand identity every two or three years.

Elements of a style guide - What is included in brand style guides services

Brand mission and core values. How you want consumers to see your brand in the future: for instance, papmall®’s pillars are integrity, tenacity, and commitment.
Tone of voice. How do you express your personality: are you genuine, youthful, professional, creative, motivating, familiar? Which form of address do you prefer, especially in languages that distinguish between formal and informal?.
Terminology. As a brand, you prefer certain words over others, and there are some that are not your cup of tea.
Grammar and syntax. Do you prefer short sentences or longer ones, do you want contractions, should numbers be spelled out, do you use acronyms or not, shall you ban exclamation marks?
Visual identity, i.e. typography, logos, color palette, graphics, layouts, imagery, physical assets, etc.
Hands-on applications. Some features may be highlighted more than others depending on the audience (internal/external) and the medium (print, digital, social, video).

Why should you hire a brand style guides designer?

A brand designer helps you identify your ideal client

Each brand designer has a razor-sharp understanding of a niche that is also your target. Because of that, they know your ideal customer like the back of their hand and will work with you to create an outstanding brand identity guide.

A brand designer uses a strategic creative process to create your visual branding

When you work with a brand designer, they will create brand style guides with careful thought based on what they have discovered about your business. This includes combining various colors, fonts, and symbols to achieve the desired result.

A brand designer know all elements of a style guide

You now understand that branding is much more than a well-designed logo and website. If the color scheme does not correspond to the brand essence, people tend to misunderstand brand symbols, resulting in a drop in conversions.

That is why you should hire a professional designer familiar with existing major brands to bridge the gap between your brand identity and how customers perceive it.

Things businesses should prepare before hiring a brand style guides designer

Below are three main factors to keep in mind before collaborating with a designer:

Money. The general consent is that you get what you pay. Creating a style guide for a company is time-intensive. Any great designer would demand a fair wage for the effort they put in.
Ownership. Inquire about ownership of any visuals used in the design and the finished product. If you want unlimited use of a photograph, notify the creator so that they can obtain exclusive graphics rights. Prepare a written contract that grants you ownership of the end products.
Market. A designer who has previously worked with companies in your industry fits the mold perfectly because they are already familiar with your market.

Build your brand style guides with papmall®!

papmall® is an e-commerce marketplace to connect and exchange values between online sellers and buyer communities. As a freelancer platform, papmall® offers free and paid services in all fields, such as Digital Marketing, Programming & Tech, Translation & Writing, etc., and, of course, Brand Style Guides, to make your brand more recognizable with a bespoke corporate design style guide. Connect with our freelancer community to cement your brand identity today!