Whether you’re a small business or a large corporation a style guide is conducive to the success of your organization. Your brand’s style guide plays a very major role in your business as it documents your brands design specifications. It is used to create balance, harmony and cohesiveness when designing all of your business’ marketing materials.
Typically a brand’s style guide consists of your company’s logo, fonts, and color palette. All of these elements are picked strategically with your companies image in mind. More detailed style guides indicate how and when to use specific elements of your brands image. They also may begin to incorporate images or words of inspiration. A well designed style guide will go as far as incorporating templates to use for social media posts.
Your brand’s style guide will be used by, yourself, employees, graphic designers, web developers, marketing agencies and anyone else you intrust your brands visual identity to. Having a style guide for your business is not to restrict your creativity, it is simply meant to give you a head start on developing a consistent and well unified brand.
Below are 5 very important reasons why you need a style guide to help your business grow faster:
Organization
The most important reason you will need a style guide for your business is that it creates organization. As a new business owner, big or small, organization is key. It is the best way to keep all your important brand info in one place. You must understand that your brand’s style guide is not just for the use of designers but for everyone one on your team. While they may not have to focus on the more detailed aspects of the style guide they still need to stay inline with the brand whether in may be through emails, reports,or presentations.
Cuts Design Time and Money
Having a style guide allows you to save time when creating images to promote your business. Your style guide will always have your fonts, and color selections on it, and will become a “bible” for training and educating new employees or designers about your brand. Style guides also help to reduce the amount of mistakes made by designers when getting marketing materials created.
Consistency and Cohesiveness
The proper style guide will begin to create consistency and cohesiveness of your brand. If done with intent your stationary, social media post, and website will all have similar looks and feel. Visual consistency creates an immediate and lasting impression. So always keep in mind that within the first 30 seconds of seeing something that has to do with your brand, consumers have already decided whether they’re going to opt in.
Brand Identity
When it comes to brand identity Apple has gotten everyone beat. They’re brand identity is very important to them. If you haven’t noticed their logo is in the center of every electronic device they create. And if it wasn’t for that alone, we would not know who they are and why we need them. So I’m positive that their company utilizes a style guide to ensure that all new employees and contractors are inline with their company’s message.
Professionalism
We spoke previously of first impressions, and they can make you or break you. When people see anything that has to do with your brand, you want to give them that your business is in fact professional. A well designed style guide let’s people know that your business is confident in the work it produces and you are able to be trusted.
If you already have a style guide for your business, you’re 10 steps ahead of the game. And, if you don’t it’s okay. Now that you have a better understanding of why you need a style guide to begin with, it’s time for you to get one laid out. If you’re unsure of how to create one yourself, give our parent company Lidyr a call at 215.550.5054 and we’ll create one for you. Once you have your style guide in place just imagine the place your business will go.