consistently presenting your business in the right way
consistent branding, consistent customers
brand guidelines perth
As sung by someone that isn’t Beyonce, brands run the world. A consistent brand identity is necessary for prospective customers to resonate with your business. When branding conflicts and inconsistencies occur, audiences are left to be confused and at the worse of cases, alienated. Herein prevention of that, lies in a brand guideline. Often known as a brand guideline or styling guideline, the document is a resource designed to ensure continuity of brand elements across an array of mediums. Consistent presentation of your brand is crucial – at Start Digital, we’ll also make that easy through our custom brand guidelines.
a breakdown of a brand guideline
A brand guideline could be described as a rule book. A document containing the do’s and don’t’s of presenting a business through a number of channels including a website, letterhead documents, merchandise, office signage and more. Often starting with a brief introduction into a business, styling guidelines incorporate guidelines for your business’ logo, brand colour palette, typography, images and writing style.
Brand Colours/Palette
Addresses a brand’s palette to ensure a consistent presentation across different mediums, digital and not. Often the branding guidelines contains select colours that are in alignment with the brand. A colour palette is likely to also specify the colour matches (Pantone name and number), print colours (CMYK) and digital colours such as the RBG and HEX codes.
Typography Guidelines
Spells out all things related to the brand’s typography and font. Majority of guidelines include the typefaces used for headlines, body text etc., design alignment such as centred, left or right and spacing (tracking and kerning) ratios. Some typography guidelines even feature backstories and relationships between fonts and branding.
Logo Guidelines
Covers the specifications for the presentation of your logo. Common details include its minimum sizes and proportions, colour variations such as inverted and black & white alongside notes of any inappropriate, improper usage.
Image Guidelines
Are extremely useful for helping personnel, both internal and external, understand the right picture presentation for a brand. Could include website photography and aspirational images alongside inspiration/mood boards plus more.
Brand Voice
A voice breakdown is sometimes omitted in a branding guideline as most don’t connect writing style with a brand identity, although at times it’s just as important as other elements. Includes messaging practices which work, brand personality descriptions and things not to do with demonstrating your brand’s voice.
brand guidelines with style
A styling guideline is extremely unique – no two businesses’ will (or should) be the same. Some will end up being as thick as a Harry Potter novel while others a simple-one page document. A majority of brand guidelines will never be revisited (although, maybe they should) and others will be revised and undergo evolution in due time. Regardless of these differences, a brand guideline is an extremely important tool for all businesses especially large, competitive organisations.
With a strong brand, you’ll better stand out from your competitors and with consistency, garner credibility and recognition through all outreach efforts. From brand development, logo creation, brand voice writing through to authentic photography, Perth-based Start Digital is here to build the perfect brand guidelines.
