A style guide helps ensure your brand is consistent across all platforms and media.
This means your customers get the same experience no matter where they encounter you.
It will help build your brand and create brand loyalty.
It is the document you share with your contributors, marketers, content creators and other staff to help them stay on brand. A style guide is important even for small teams.
Ideally, a style guide provides guidelines on how your brand should be presented from both a graphic and a language perspective.
Both are important and both make up your brand.
A visual style guide will include your logo, colors, typography (fonts) and any other look and feel elements important to your brand. This can also include the allowed use of your logo in different sizes and colors.
A language style guide will include specific rules about the company voice, tone, and grammar conventions. These include active vs. passive, first person vs. second or third, spelling (for example British vs. American), punctuation & abbreviation standards and much more.
Usually, a brand specialist or graphic artist will create a visual style guide for you, and a copywriter or content creator will help you create your language style guide.
For small businesses, hiring a branding specialist or graphic artist and even a copywriter isn't always on budget.
To help you with this, at least partially, I've created a basic visual style guide as a Power Point presentation. It's easy to edit and has instructions on what you need to change and update. Once you're done, save it as a PDF, and you're all set to go.
Download the Style Guide Template here.
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