Brand Identity & Style Guides Asset Creation
Establish a consistent, reusable design system that elevates your brand and supports your marketing efforts.
We design and deliver a concrete style guide asset that can be shared directly with team members, vendors, and partners for a totally cohesive brand identity.
Why is Brand Consistency Important?
Brand guidelines help ensure your colors, typography, and logo usage are used correctly across projects and teams. Without proper brand guidelines, even successful businesses end up using design styles inconsistently as projects change hands.
Why consistent branding is important:
- Logos get stretched, compressed, or used with the wrong colors across different materials
- Colors are subtly or drastically different from the specifically approved for the brand
- Inconsistent tone of voice and value proposition gives conflicting messages to customers
- Team members and vendors may use logos, font, and color differently or use unapproved variations
- More time is spent working through design revisions when you don’t start with a specific set of guidelines
What Does a Brand Guidelines Document Look Like?
Well, it looks something like this – although this is only an example.
What’s Included in a Brand Style Guide Document?
Brand Story & Tone of Voice
Defines your mission statement, value proposition, and the writing style that can be referenced for all kinds of messaging.
Logo Acceptable Usage
Shows specifically approved logo examples, sizing, spacing, and color variations. We also include examples of unacceptable logo use.
Color Standards
Outlines the exact color palette for your brand, including primary, secondary, and neutral colors, with exact color codes for both digital and print applications.
Typography & Font
Approved fonts for headlines, body text, and special applications to maintain consistent visual hierarchy.
Iconography
If iconography is part of your brand, we include the icon library to set the standards for icon style, line weight, sizing, and color.
Image Guidelines
Provides visual examples of the style, mood, and treatment of image assets or photography that align with your established brand identity.
Example Style Guide Elements
Our Process for Creating Professional Brand Guidelines
We start with discovery and planning. We’ll work closely with you to create a deeper understanding of your business goals and how you’ve used branding in the past. We’ll also look at your competitors to see what they’re doing and how you can stand out.
Your logo becomes the cornerstone. We design (or refine existing) logos that will work across many types of mediums from digital to print—from social media to business cards.
We finalize colors, fonts, and imagery. This is the real magic of style guidelines. We document specific color standards (including RGB, CMYK, hex) and typography styles for consistent font use, sizing, and spacing. We may even include an approved icon library or branded images.
Finally, we put it all together in one asset. You receive a practical document that can be used internally or shared with third-party vendors.
A brand style guide is more than a logo. It’s a consistent set of rules for implementing your brand across different visual mediums.
FAQ on Branding & Style Guides
What’s the difference between brand identity and brand style guides?
Brand identity is the bigger picture – it defines your overall strategy, tone of voice, and value proposition. Everything including your logo, website, marketing, and social media is part of your total identity. On the other hand, the brand style guide is a practical document that shows exactly how to consistently implement that identity through visual mediums.
What’s included in a complete branding and style guide?
Our branding and style guide is a complete digital deliverable that includes your brand story and tone of voice, logo acceptable usage guidelines, color standards (RGB, CMYK, hex), typography/font usage, iconography, and imagery examples. We can customize the guide to include specific assets.
How long does it take to get the finished style guide asset?
The timeline ultimately depends on the number of assets, the complexity of each asset, and the amount of revisions we make. Small, simple assets may only take a week to turn around, while larger design projects like brand guidelines or full website mockups may take 3-4 weeks. We’ll establish clear timelines during project planning.
Can you work with existing brand elements?
Yes. We’re flexible when it comes to what design assets you already have, or what you don’t have. Sometimes we use existing logos with no changes, or with minor changes. Other projects we are recreating everything for a new cohesive brand. We’ll help you figure out what the best path forward is.
How do brand guidelines help my business’ bottom line?
Think of your style guide as the go-to instruction manual for your brand’s identity. You can share the asset directly with team members, vendors, and partners which can all reference the same document to maintain consistency. That means marketing campaigns and design assets created by different people at different times can all use the same set of rules for color, typography, and logo use. Standardizing these style rules save designers time in production, reduce the number of revisions needed, and may even ultimately improve your conversion rates.
