Use a style guide to grow your brand and keep it consistent

What is a style guide?

A style guide, sometimes called your branding guidelines, is an important document as it sets out the ‘rules’ for how your brand should be represented visually.

Why is it beneficial to have a style guide?

A style guide helps anyone using your brand—employees, designers, developers, marketers—understand how it should be applied.

It’s a set of rules and guidelines to follow so everyone can keep your brand’s image consistent, and its integrity intact. This helps you achieve a coordinated, professional look across all your marketing and media, making it easy for you to grow your brand so you can thrive in competitive markets.

Incredibly important for digital applications as well as for physical marketing collateral, all businesses and organisations seeking to advertise their services or products on- or offline should have a style guide to prevent their brand’s image straying from where it should be.

It’s about avoiding mixed messaging, preventing confusion, maximising your brand’s impact, and steering you to success.

What is included in a style guide?

Style guides can be very simple or very detailed depending on individual needs.

A simple style guide might only lay out how your logo should look, what your corporate colours are, and what your preferred corporate font is.

A larger style guide or set of branding guidelines might lay out the rules for the kinds of photography and imagery you should use. They could even include complete layouts for stationery, brochures, vehicles, uniforms, and more.

At Argon, we can prepare both simple and complex style guides as well as a complementary ‘message guide’ document which identifies your key marketing messages and the words you can use to communicate them.

Better brand clarity leads to better website design and development results.

Whenever we create a website for an established brand, our starting point is always requesting a copy of any current style guide—as this helps us create a website experience that’s cohesive with other brand touchpoints your audience is already familiar with.

Larger organisations may even have a comprehensive design system which collects all design resources that can be used to help create digital media. A design system could include your style guide, relevant code, website plugins, logo files, and other brand assets.

Still not sure what a style guide is and if you should have one to support your brand strategy?

Speak to our friendly team to learn more about ‘what is a style guide?’.

We can create a style guide if you need one or, if you already have one, we can use what you’ve got to build a benchmark-raising, on-brand website that will help you grow.

So, start the journey—contact us on 08 8223 3099 or email info@argon.com.au.