A brand guide is all about the heart and soul of your brand – its mission, vision, and values portrayed in the design. It also explains to everyone exactly how to communicate your brand. So how do you create an appealing brand guide design? We’ll show you how to do it in five steps.
What is a brand guide?
A brand guide is a collection of elements that depicts how a company presents itself to the world through its logo, font and color selection, photography, etc.
In other words, it’s a reference tool that helps to maintain a brand’s consistency. It looks, feels, and sounds. It’s so powerful that some people even call it a branded Bible, but don’t let that intimidate you, it’s just different names for the same document.
Using an appealing brand guide ensures that your brand looks and feels the same, even if different people work in customer service, marketing, design, and sales.
Why are brand guidelines important?
Think of your brand identity as an aura of your company. This is how your customers recognize you and begins to trust you. If you see someone change their looks and behavior all the time, you won’t feel like you know who they are, and I certainly wouldn’t trust them.
How to craft a trendy brand guide
Step 1: Get Inspiration from Brand Guide
Seeking inspirations always helps your brand to evolve, and get better. Your brand guide should depict the originality of your brand. No matter what type of resource you are crafting, without brainstorming and seeking some inspiration you can’t develop an appealing brand guide.
Consider these things:
- What results were better for your brand in the past? Successfully collected samples of advertisements, emails, banners, etc.
- What type of branding do you like of your competitors?
- What questions have been asked? Pay attention to repeated comments. Providing the same style for your writers and designers may be worth adding to your style guide.
Give special instructions for what you like and what you don’t like (for example, the picture is correct but the text is incorrect). You may find yourself using some of it in a section dedicated to dubbing brand or guide images.
Step 2: Define the Standards of Brand Guide Elements
After collecting the inspiration, it is time to work with the designer to integrate them. Select a designer who communicates well and makes you feel comfortable. During the opening process, your designer will become your partner. They might have ideas or information that you may not have considered.
Brand Story:
All your brand introduction and Mission and Vision.
Logo:
The graphical representation of your brand and the identity from which it would be recognized.
Voice:
Writing style and selection of words affect your audience that’s how they feel and think about you.
Imagery:
Consider utilizing what kind of imagery would be suitable for you and goes best along with your brand nature.
Typography:
Use fonts that are you would like to dedicate for your entire branding guide and feel, so the same fonts can be utilized throughout the brand resources.
Color Palette:
Select the brand theme that you think might be suitable for your branding and can be used in other marketing campaigns.
Step 3. List Brand Representatives
Most companies need to include six primary elements in a brand guide, some companies might dig deeper.
Is your brand primarily digital? You may need to specify how to distribute images on your website.
Do you sell real goods? You may need packaging instructions that explain when to use the product name and when to use the company name.
Do you focus on social media marketing? Therefore, you may need guidance on the types of images used in your posts.
An appealing brand guide should be suitable for the organization to which it belongs. Start by listing other items to be covered in the guide. The following is a useful checklist for generating ideas:
Step 4. Plan your Brand Revolution
Your brand guide depicts your brand nature along with all the historical changes that happened. It’s like a living document that needs to be updated accordingly as you implement future changes.
You have to visit it periodically so none of the changes are left out from being updated.
Dedicate one portion in your brand guide to showcase your future implementations or inspirations you would like to execute so they can be found easily when required. After that craft, a calendar and perform the changes that you want to execute. You can implement changes in one month, a quarter, or a year after finalizing the guild lines.
Over to you
By adopting these tips you can craft an appealing brand guide for your brand without any hassle. You can also consider our Branding services in which we provide you with the best appealing brand guide, which is eye-candy, easy to understand, and descriptive according to your niche.