How To Create Brand Style Guides Like A Pro (FREE TEMPLATE)

The world's most recognizable brands use this one document to build credibility and trust. That document is a Brand Style Guide. A brand style guide is a foundational document for your brand and becomes incredibly helpful as your business scales. It helps you define your brand's identity so that you can create consistent content for your potential customers and for anyone just getting started. Think of your brand style guide as a rulebook for all of your marketing and communications materials. In this video, I'm going to outline exactly how to create your own brand style guide and provide you with some examples and tools to get started. Every great brand style guide will have two components. First, a brand overview that defines your audience, company mission and messaging. Second, a visual foundation that defines your logos, colors, fonts and creative elements. Let's get started. To help us, I'm going to use a Brand Style Guide template. When creating your brand overview, you first need to have a brand purpose or mission statement that explains why your brand exists in the world. Think about the value that you bring to your potential customers. For example, let's look at Google. Our mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. This is a great example to follow because the mission statement is short and to the point, but it lets us know that Google's goal is always to serve the user. Some other pieces of information that you can include under this section are things like your brand origin, promise, values and personality. Within the template, you'll see examples to help you draft your own copy. These details will help anyone on your team understand how to write for your brand. For example, if you are creating content for Night Nike, it would be inspirational, Apple would be innovative and Mercedes would ooze luxury. These brands establish their tone and personality early on so that all the content they create would be aligned. Google does a great job of listing out their brand's values so that when it comes to their content, everyone is on the same page about striving for the best and always putting their users first. The second component of a great brand style guide are the visual guidelines. This is going to be things like your logo, color palette, font photography and typography. It's a lot to define, but our template will help you identify each creative element. First, let's define your brand color palette. You can customize it using the color wheel. You can also define if it's a primary or secondary color for your brand. This will help people know when to use the color and the content that they develop. Your logo and colors are crucial for brand recognition, so make sure to define your official colors and usage. One of my favorite examples of this is found in the Twitter Brand Style Guide. Their Brand Style Guide defines how their logo should be displayed and even defines which colors are allowed to be used. Once you define your logo and colors, you can move on to selecting your font to add variation. Your company may have a primary font which is going to be the most recognizable and frequently used, and a secondary font which you can use to reflect the different tones of your brand across multiple channels. Some fonts work well in print but don't look so great on screen. So if your brand exists mostly online, make sure to choose fonts and font sizes that are optimized for digital typography can distinguish your brand from the crowd and play a major role in your company's identity. For these reasons, you may even want to create your own custom font. Now let's move on to selecting your photography. Most content you create will include images. Filling out this section in detail will help tremendously when you're working with any agencies or photographers. Here you can fill out details on your lighting, colors, moods you want to capture, etc. For HubSpot, our content includes a lot of action shots, smiles and our signature color orange. I would recommend creating a library filled with images that you can have as inspo for all your projects. Or you can even add extra slides in this template and create your own mood board that explains exactly who your brand is and the types of images that you want to create. If you scroll down to the last slide, you'll see that we saved it for you to add anything extra that we may have missed. I would recommend using it to include information on your buyer Persona. This outlines details of your ideal customer. Writing your customer's job, age, gender and any challenges they have that your brand can solve will be a great reminder on who you serve when creating your content. This template includes slides that go over many different elements that you can include in your brand style guide and the best part is you can continue adding onto this document as your brand grows and evolves. Make sure to download this free template. I'll have it linked down below. Thank you guys so much for watching and I'll see you next time. I can find this client info have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform so it shares its data across every application. Every team can stay aligned. No out of sync spreadsheets or dueling databases. HubSpot grow better.