Style guides, what should they include
Style guides and brand books underpin a brand’s communication framework. they affect the way an organisation speaks to their supporters and funders to how a brand communicates to its customers and stakeholders. Often seen as the 'tailbrand's' tone where employees are forced to adhere to strict rules that prevent them from having their own voice in the organisation, they should be a guide to help that employee speak to their audiences in a liberated and relevant way. That can mean creating their own t-shirt to produce an annual report.
What should my brand guidelines cover?
Well, if you are NASA, the British Council of a reasonable small charity, there are certain things your style guide should cover, and these are:
Logo usage
How your logo should be rendered and how it should not be changed. It may seem like a good idea to add a snow topping to your logo during Christmas, but it isn't.
Logo positioning, may not seem important but it is. The size and position of your logo on printed material for instance makes a big difference. Imagine a pile of literature where your organisation's logo is all different sizes and positions on a table. Or, imagine they are all the same size, top left, which look like a coherent set of materials?
Font usage
When your designer delivers a corporate identity or ‘brand’ they will recommend a family of fonts to use as part of your identity scheme. These will typically be based on the font used in your logo – but not always. Imagine reading a paragraph of text set in the Nasa ‘worm’ font!
Designers will often also recommend what are called ‘web safe’ fonts, although this term is a little outdated. They refer to fonts typically installed on all machines, Arial, Verdana etc.
The usage instructions can get very detailed. For instance when to use uppercase or when to use which style and when. It is not unusual for a guide to have more than one house font, but more than two is seen as excessive.
Colour palette
Again, your designer will build you a colour palette to accompany your identity. These are based on the colours used in the logo, these tend to be the primary colour palette. Often there is a secondary palette to compliment the primary. This is handy for an organisation that produced a lot of collateral and needs greater flexibility.
Consistent colour use can be very important to a brand and is one of the major contributors to brand recognition. Easy Jet anyone?
Image style and usage
Image style and usage could mean a lot of things, not just the use of photography. For instance, maybe the organisation only uses illustration or a certain style of icon.
In the case of photography, the guide will typically stipulate the style and content of the images. For instance reportage with natural lighting.
Tone of voice
This section is often overlooked and with smaller organisations, it may not be necessary. If you can get content editors to follow the guidelines, they can bring a strong level of clarity to communications. They can cover a small or large amount of guidance, but nearly all cover mission, vision and descriptors.
They also can include what word to use and what not to, the style of punctuation and much more.
Document templates
At the very least stationery templates are defined and detailed. More elaborate style guides include templates for core documents, their structure, cover designs and use of typography. It should be noted that when stipulating document templates it is likely that these will change more frequently than the other core elements of the corporate identity.
This is a key point, a style guide is an evolving, moving document. Not something that is set in stone at one point in time, never to be reviewed.
Style guides are important, and it is important to ensure they are followed, if not all hell can break loose and your logo will be reset in Comic Sans, covered in snow with a kitten on top.