When it comes to growing your business, think of marketing and branding as two sides of a coin. Each side is essential, but they work together to serve a larger purpose. In their simplest form:

Your brand is the personality of your business and the why clients come to you.
Marketing is how you communicate your brand and make yourself known.

For a complete guide on branding vs marketing we recommend you to check our other post here.

Essential Elements of a Brand Style Guide

Brand guidelines, also known as a brand style guide, govern the composition, design, and general look-and-feel of a company's branding. Brand guidelines can dictate the content of a logo, presentation, website, advertisement, and similar marketing collateral.

Depending on your business type and needs, you may consider some different elements for your own brand style guide, but here’s what we recommend including as a basic starting point for creating your brand style guide:

1. Logo

Your brand style guide should include all variations of your logo, including your primary logo, secondary logo and sub-marks.

The primary logo

This is the main graphic that represents your business and is used most often. When designing the primary logo, our goal is to communicate who you are, what you offer, or where you operate. This logo may include your company’s tagline, website, or geographic location.

Used most of the time
Includes full business name
May include tagline, website, or geographic location

Your brand style guide may also include a brand pattern, which uses pieces of your logos to play a background supporting role. The patterns are best used on social media graphics, your website and your packaging.

Secondary Logo:

The secondary logo is a simplified version of the primary logo. This design may eliminate some text or rearrange the elements to improve readability in small sizes. Secondary logos are intended for online use or when you must resize your logo to small formats.

Simplified design & text
Used only when the logo is resized small
Includes full business name

Sub-mark Logo:

A sub-mark logo (can also be called favicon or symbol) is a stripped down graphic of your main logo. The sub-mark typically does not include text or the full name of the business. Instead, the sub-mark logo is a graphical shape, or symbol that represents your business. The sub-mark logo is used when the design must be resized to extremely small formats or to help communicate your brand quickly. It is designed to help your clients quickly identify and remember you.

Commonly used online and on social media
Used when logo is resized to extra small formats
Includes single letter(s), number(s), or symbol

2. Logo Usage

In addition to your logos, a brand style guide should also include explicit guidelines for how these elements should (and should not) be used. This is to ensure your logo marks are respected. Things to include in the logo usage section:

Space around the logo
Logo’s colour palette
Typography and font
Logo sizes including minimum size
Description of the logo
Colour variations depending on dark and light backgrounds. Colour and monochromatic.
Logo versions and when to be used.
Showcasing bad logo usage (no stretching, no cropping, to always be legible and such_

3. Colour Palette

Your brand colours are some of the most recognisable aspects of your overall branding.

There isn’t a set number for how many colours you should incorporate in your branding. Ultimately, it will vary depending on other aspects of your business and brand identity. For example, if your overall brand aesthetic is modern and minimal, you may want to stick to minimal use of colour; but if your brand is bright and cheerful, you could enhance your overall aesthetic by using multiple complementary brand colours.

A tool that can be helpful for developing your brand colours is Color Hunt, Color Hunt has a “create” feature where everyone can create and submit their own colour combination. Each palette is public property and not owned by a specific creator. It also has a “like” feature where you can like your favourite colour palette and you can easily view your likes on the “likes” page. This is a great site to get inspired by the many colour combinations available to you and to create your own and get reviewed as to its quality standard.

Once you’ve chosen your brand colours, document your colour codes in your brand style kit to ensure the exact colours are used across all mediums. Four of the most popular colour types that we recommend you to record are— PMS, CMYK, RGB and Hex — all fall into one of the two basic categories. PMS and CMYK are for print. RGB and HEX are for onscreen.

4. Fonts / Typography

Fonts are one of the most important, yet most overlooked, essential elements of a brand style guide. The font(s) you choose to represent your brand should be thoughtfully selected to reflect your brand identity and how you’d like to be perceived.

In general, it’s best to stick to just two fonts. We often recommend one serif and one sans-serif font. Serif fonts are easier to read in large blocks of text, whereas sans-serif fonts (those without the little lines on the ends of its characters) tend to be more screen-friendly. Script fonts may be useful for stylistic accents.

Like your brand colours, the appropriate font(s) for your particular business will vary depending on several factors such as industry, brand voice and tone, target demographic, and types of marketing materials you’ll be using.

5. Imagery

We cannot overstate the importance of professional imagery to market your brand. If you have the resources, we suggest a professional photoshoot for your brand. But if that’s not in your budget or you plan to incorporate stock or user-generated images, establish image guidelines for your brand to help maintain consistency across all platforms—website, email marketing, social media, print marketing materials. There are a ton of available websites to do so. Shutterstock and Adobe Stock to name a few.

Be descriptive and provide examples of appropriate visuals, along with general do’s and don’ts for visual treatment. If you favour well-lit, realistic photography over illustrations, make that clear. Some photography categories can include:

Event photography
Profile photography
Group photography
Product photography
While on the topic - an illustrative system should also be added if you brand opts for one. Just as crucial as all other brand elements, illustrations should be consistent.

6. Brand Tone/Voice

Brand tone refers to the words that your company chooses to use in order to show your brand’s values and personality. Establishing the overall tone of voice used in your branding can be one of the more complicated parts of the branding process. To start, answer the following questions:

Whose point of view are you speaking from? This might be the business as a whole, the founder or CEO, or maybe even a brand mascot.
What style of communication does this voice have? Witty? Direct? Conversational?
What type of vocabulary does this voice use? Formal? Industry jargon? Slang? Common keywords phrases? Multi-lingual?
Who does this voice speak to? Does it speak directly to a single person or to a broad audience in general?

Using Your Brand Style Guide

Brand style guides are usually shared as downloadable PDFs or print documents and serve as a quick reference to understanding the logos, colours, fonts, and messaging that represent your brand.

We recommend distributing your brand style guide to employees and key partners, such as your printing vendor, media partners, external stakeholders, or anyone that will play a role in your telling your brand’s story.

Get Started

If you need help establishing or refining your brand, the team at Bvrly Creative is ready to help. We will work with you to identify what visual design and message you should be using to convey the value of your company to potential customers. Then, we will create a unique brand identity and use it as a filter to ensure that your image is both cohesive and consistent across all print and digital media platforms.

What should your Brand Style Guide include?