Building a brand style guide - a case study from a client's project

In this blog post, I would like to share with you a real life example of what a brand styling entails and what makes a good brand styling. I’m going to do this by walking you through the branding work done for the wonderful Dove and Dovelet, one of my (favourite) clients (ever).

Introducing the brand  

Dove and Dovelet is an Australian small business selling conscious functional design accessories for babies and their parents. Their style is minimalist and directed to parents who like Nordic/ Scandinavian styling in both home decor and fashion.

The business started in 2014 and at the time of our collaboration it was already pretty mature. That is when they thought it was time to re-brand and revamp their logo and image, so they contacted me.

Here is a how a design process goes from the moment the client contacts a design agency.

First thing first

Before diving into the design process, it is important for a designer to get a clear idea of what the business’s goals and values are. This is why I always start collaborating with my clients by submitting a questionnaire.

The questions aim to clarify who is the business’ ideal customer, what values the brand has, how the owners want their brand to be perceived. It also asks style preferences and brand awareness objectives.

This is a good time to get these things clear. Many small business owners do not do this exercise until some years later into their business. While you may not know where you’re going at the beginning of your journey, surely there is a moment when you need to get clear.

It is hard brainstorming work, but very much needed to get an intentional direction forward.

Once the questionnaire is done, the process can move to the fun part - the design!

The Brand Style Guide

Brand Style Guide for Dove and Dovelet

So, the first step towards the actual brand style guide is creating a mood board. This is meant to gather inspirational photos of what vibe you want your brand to communicate to your audience, plus getting a visual idea of who is your target customer. You can see Dove and Dovelet’s mood board at the bottom of the brand style guide (see the first photo).

The mood board lays the foundations for the rest of the graphic choices that will make up the brand style guide.

Typically, these elements are logo, icons or sub-marks, patterns and fonts.

In the specific case of Dove and Dovelet, we picked:

LOGO: a clean, geometric logo that incorporated the original D+D elements of the previous logo. Since the brand caters towards a minimalist style, the design needs to be clean. As Scandinavian style is a strong element in the mood board, the hexagon is a good choice, since geometric shapes are often used in Scandinavian design.

Typically, I create a main logo and some logo variations that can be used for profile pictures. The latter ones are usually an icon or a simplified version of the main logo. Since icons and profile avatars will be displayed in small sizes, it’s always better to keep any potential clutter away and leave in the design only what is readable. 

COLOURS: being D+D a minimalist brand, we picked a simple black and white palette, which pairs well also with the natural materials used in many of the brand’s products (wood, linen). The combo creates a nice stylish Nordic feel.

PATTERNS: taking the elements from the logo (D, the + sign and the hexagon), I created a pattern that is coherent with the style and colour palette of the brand (see the second photo!). Again, Scandinavian design is often associated with geometric elements, so this pattern aims at communicating an influence from this type of design.

FONTS: We picked two fonts - one for the D+D and one for displaying the brand’s full name. Both fonts are clean, but different. The D+D part of the logo is in the font Merlo Round from the Merlo typeface (or font family). The full name is written in Prestige Elite Bold, which is a clean font with an old typewriting feel.

The corollary design material

Keeping in mind the style visualised in the brand style guide, we then proceeded to create two corollary branding material designs - a business card and a label. 

THE BUSINESS CARD: the design created was a simple and clean one, to keep in line with the minimalist vibe - just the logo in the centre and few necessary pieces of information.

THE LABEL: the label was designed with the vintage apothecary labels´ style in mind. This style is nicely clean but interesting and not boring. Plus, it pairs well with the Prestige Elite typeface, as many old apothecary labels were filled out with a typewriting type of font. 

So, what makes a good brand styling?

If you had a look at Dove and Dovelet’s website, you might have seen that the design is very aligned with the graphic work that I showed you in this blog post.

Dove and Dovelet is in fact a brand that has a very clear idea of what their style and aspirations are, so much that the owner herself already had a clear vision when she came to me and could clearly pinpoint the best design for her brand. 

So, what makes a good brand styling? It’s the cohesiveness in referring back to the brand’s values.

As you may have guessed, at the base of all is a clear idea of your goal. Without this, it will be difficult to create a coherent style - something which really reinforces a brand’s image. That is why the brainstorming work of the initial questionnaire is so essential.

Then, to help you keep your styling cohesive and coherent, you want to create a brand style guide to use as reference for your branding efforts. This will keep you on track, so that you will not get lost on the way.

It’s easy for a young small business to divert and start following trends and fashions. However, this eventually makes your branding scattered and its image will just weaken over time.

Every small business needs a period of experimentation at the beginning. Therefore, the brand style guide will probably serves you best once your business is starting to settle and needs to reinforce its image.

After reading this blog post, I hope you will be able to evaluate whether your brand styling is directed towards cohesiveness or if there are elements to be changed and re-directed.

I would be thrilled if you wanted to collaborate with me on your brand styling. You can contact me using the form below to discuss your project :).

Note: If you want to know more about what a brand is, head over to the other blog post on the topic!