What is a brand style guide and does your business need one?
Photo by Shayilin Wallace on Unsplash
Many small business owners are familiar with what a logo is. We all recognise at a glance Nike’s swoosh icon or Starbucks’ mermaid. We do not even need to read the companies’ names to know that those symbols belong to a café chain and a sportswear shop.
Whether you’re a Nike or Starbucks fan or not, we can all agree that these brands are strong and did their brand awareness job well.
As you may suspect, creating a brand goes well beyond having a pretty mermaid logo to display. This is especially true if your brand is in a business field where your target customers are design conscious or design savvy.
But that’s also true for any type of business, really. To gain a raving fan base that will support your business throughout time, you want your audience to deeply and emotionally associate with your brand.
You want your brand to become an experience for your customers and potential clients.
I will give you a relatable example of what this means.
Think about your favourite café in town. Very likely it displays unique interiors and it offers a special coffee blend you like. The music the staff selects for the shop is your favourite genre and even their mugs are lovely. No detail is left to chance.
What makes you go there back and back again is that you get that special unique (and coherent!) vibe every single time you visit their shop.
You likely don’t get the same feeling when having a latte in other cafés. Not at the same level, at least.
Translated into small biz jargon, what makes them unique is their brand.
A brand is a name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller’s good or service as distinct from those of other sellers” (American Marketing Association).
As you can see from the definition, there is a combination of elements (name, terms, symbols and more) that meet together to create a brand. We are here on a designer’s website, so I will keep the discussion within my area of knowledge. So, in this blog post we will focus only on the design aspect of a brand.
Now you may be wondering - ok, what does creating a brand entail for a business when it comes to choosing anything design related, then?
Practically speaking, the aim for a business is creating visual work that resonates with their brand’s values. The symbols, the colours, the style and the fonts you will choose need to be coherent with your message.
If you’re catering to fans of Little Women and period drama, you may choose for your logo a calligraphic font or a typewriter’s inspired one. Definitely not an 80s computer font.
If you’re promoting a relaxing, slow living lifestyle you may avoid using black and red colour combinations in your palette and go for softer tones. You don’t want bold visuals, you want cozy ones.
And so on. You get the idea.
Next question you may have - so what does a designer do for a client in order to achieve a coherent brand design?
The typical deliverable brand work produced by a designer to help a client is a brand style guide.
While large companies may develop thick brand guide books covering pretty much every detail of how to use their logo and colour palettes in any given situation, small businesses can opt for a simple one-sheet guide.
Brand Style Guide and Business Cards created for Kit & Kate
The brand style guide is produced by a brand designer after having discussed with the clients the business’s core values, goals and ideal client’s description.
The designer then proceeds to create a set of deliverables, typically in the form of:
a logo or a logotype (with alternate variations)
an icon (or submark)
a colour palette
fonts selection
a mood board
extra graphic elements, if required
patterns, if required
The final product is a sheet called Brand Style Guide which will inform all of the company’s future visual marketing efforts. The aim is to keep the brand’s image consistent and - therefore - easily recognisable in the clients’ mind, thus creating brand awareness.
Why is this useful?
For a small business owner this is useful for various reasons:
1) It prevents you from changing your branding every time a new fashion or trend comes up. While it is often the case that at the beginning of a business one needs to pivot often and the logo may change, once the business is taking off clients will start to get familiar with your logo. You don’t want to confuse them by trying out something new every six months.
2) Once the brand style guide is ready, it becomes a non brainer for a company to decide on which colours, fonts and images to use for their marketing material. It’s all written in there, that’s your reference.
3) When your business start to grow and you start to hire people, they will know exactly what image you’re trying to promote. You’ll all be on the same page.
Do all small businesses need the whole brand style guide or is it fine to have just a logo?
Many businesses opt to have a logo only - and I think that is completely fine in some cases.
If your business does not rely heavily on visual products and is - for instance - more content based, then a logo will suffice. For example if you’re a research centre or a data analysis centre.
Also, if you are operating with more technical products, I believe it is ok not to have a complete brand style guide. Customers will likely come to you for your technical reputation in the field rather than for the emotional association they have with your service.
If you’re in a business that instead relies on connecting to your audience through some shareable feeling or emotion, then I believe that having a complete brand style guide can greatly help your marketing efforts. It’s about the overall experience you can provide. It directs you on how to make your image stronger over time.
I hope this post clarifies some doubts you may have on what design can do for a business and what a style guide is.
If you are curious to discover the step-by-step process that goes into building a brand style guide, I have a blog post with a real case drawn from a project I did for one of my customers. You can find the article here. Enjoy!