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Having a unified face becomes pivotal for any brand when several teams and channels are operational. The reason why the brand guide is often termed as a brand bible is that this document showcases the core ideas and personality of your brand. Without clear and uniform brand guidelines, it gets challenging to specify what your company stands for.
Apart from five essential elements, viz. mission, target audience, core values, vision, and brand personality, there’s a whole lot that goes into curating your brand guide. This article enlists ways to prevent inconsistency while designing this document.
●Be precise with vision and mission statement
There’s no point in enlisting a blurry mission statement that fails to outlines what your brand strives to achieve. Thus, you should be concise with this essential element of your brand style guide so that your targeted audience can actively know:
- What do you do?
- How do you do it?
- Whom are you doing it for?
Similarly, you need to be attentive while coming up with your brand’s vision statement as it highlights your core values. A strong vision statement will not only humanize your brand but also let your customers connect to it on a personal level.
●Understand your own brand
Firstly, you need to chalk down what you think of the brand image before it can be reflected in your brand guide. The trick is to go with the emotional aspects that you’re going to include with your brand voice.
For instance, instead of presenting your company as merely a place to buy products and services from, you should outline what benefits one would get upon choosing you over others. Everything that makes you a standout among your competitors needs to be listed so that your audience can realize your brand identity.
●Focus on logo usage
A logo is undoubtedly the face of any company and turns out to be an essential brand element. Specifying your logo usage instructions becomes vital as it allows you to maintain the integrity of your brand.
For this, you need to mention the minimum size of your logo along with a detailed description of how you want it to be presented. Make sure you don’t tweak the graphics in your logo files once everything is set up and done.
●Incorporate a color palette
Color choice shouldn’t be left unattended when your key focus is to have a robust branding. Begin with chalking down your products and services so as to look for different shades that go well with these. Using material design can also be significantly beneficial when you’re looking for a clean layout for your webpages. Such a design is not only cleaner but also enhances responsiveness, thus proving to be a great resource.
Instead of turning your website into a rainbow; stick to 3-4 colors, use them appropriately through various elements of your webpages. Your style guide also needs to outline ways to reproduce these colors so that consistency can be maintained whilst all future use cases.
●Don’t underestimate brand photography
Your brand style guide can only be successful if you have paid enough heed to add suitable visual elements in your webpages. Brand photography becomes inevitable when every company in the market is actively engaged in including catchy pictures.
While free stock images can be handy in a low budget scenario, hiring professionals for this job can take your brand’s personality to the next level.
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Photo: Pixabay