The Importance of Brand Style Guides

Ever asked someone to create a new document, presentation, or web page and tell them to make your logo “look good” without passing along your brand guidelines? Well, when it comes back blinking with a glow AND a drop shadow behind it, you’ll know the importance of brand and style guides. As your brand is leveraged in more print and online materials, consistency and accuracy are vitally important – for both your internal and external users. Your staff represents and explains your company and your brand just about every day, which means they are your first brand ambassadors. If you don’t specify how to represent your brand, then they can quickly go off-script and multiple versions of your brand and messaging can quickly circulate. It’s kind of like the telephone game. Imagine playing the telephone game with 10 people, and read them your mission statement. See how it comes out? Pro tip: send a written script along with each of those telephone touch points, and your messaging will come out pristine on the other end!

– Chris Foss, Co-Founder & President

Brand and style guides are crucial! They’re the foundation for how your business appears on and offline. A brand guide helps your internal team and external partners use a cohesive voice and appearance in all mediums. A brand guide includes information relating to how you talk about your products or services, what type of language you use: conversational? technical? etc. It can also include information regarding how your logo should be used, what colors you should use, what fonts should be chosen. Sometimes brand guides will include details on photography. Creating a comprehensive brand guide and referring to it often will ensure your marketing materials have the same look and feel every time, no matter who works on them. Over time, this will help make your brand recognizable to your users and help validate your business.

– Sylvia Foerster, Creative Manager

Having a brand and style guide is an absolute must! In having this, it gives your site a uniform look that gives the user a better experience. If things look and feel the same from one page to the next, users won’t feel like they are leaving your site and going to another one. It also creates a familiarity with the site that allows them to more easily navigate through the pages.

– Brandon Vreeman, Front End Developer

Brand style guides ensure that content distinguishes a brand from its competitors, and is cohesive. Staying on-brand is a must in the design world. You want your users to easily pick you out of the crowd.

– The Ironistic Team