Why Every Company Needs a Style Guide

Every industry has its own best practices and rules that generally understood to be at least somewhat steadfast—and design is no exception. When working on a website or online identity, designers labor over which colors, typefaces, and other elements they’ll use to best demonstrate the look and feel of the company.

Yet, in marketing, plenty of companies seem all too willing to shrug off the design work treat their online presence like the Wild West. This can create brand confusion for customers, and make a headache for future designers who might work on your site or blog.

To help ensure that all of your company’s elements look, feel, and sound the same, it’s a good idea to create a brand book or style guide—and then stick to it.

What’s in a Style Guide or Brand Book?

Your content marketing style guide or brand book is essentially where any and all people creating outward-facing documents, graphics, or other materials can go to find the guidelines for representing your brand cohesively.

In a brand book, you’ll find fonts (both primary and secondary), colors, style dos and don’ts (Oxford comma in or out? Title case?), spelling and punctuation rules, and even a bit about your customer. You may also wish to include templates for email signatures, documents (like press releases), and other texts that you want to look the same.

Why Do I Need One?

There’s a lot of noise on the internet, so you need to give your readers and users visual and verbal cues that help them recognize your work.

This book serves as the go-to document for creating social media graphics, email newsletters, blog posts, and anything else potential clients may see. It helps ensure a voice and appearance that is clean, uniform—and uniquely you!

Whether it’s creating social media user icons, posting to Facebook, scheduling Tweets, or writing press releases, the brand book keeps everything that comes from your company looking and feeling exactly like your company.

How Do I Get One?

To create a style guide or brand book, consult your design team, as well as fellow marketers. Include the hard design elements—color numbers, fonts, etc—as well as stylistic best practices and possibly even sample photography.

Then, consider calling a meeting to brainstorm and solidify what goes in the book. What’s the goal of the brand book—and of your company? What should all new employees know? What do you find yourself always asking about?

And be sure to allow this document to really live; save it somewhere that anyone in your company can get to and make notes on. Much like the dictionary, this piece of text and imagery is meant to describe your company as it is and as it will be. Feel free to add to it as you remember new bits of information or inspiration as you wish—and consult the book if you ever get overwhelmed or misguided.

Ready to create your own style guide?

efelle creative is an award-winning, Seattle-based web marketing firm that specializes in website design and development, website content management, search engine optimization, and other online marketing services. Since 2005, efelle has worked with hundreds of businesses to help them with their web development needs. Call us at 206.384.4909 or fill out our online contact form to get in touch with a custom web design specialist.