What are some of the key benefits of using a brand style guide and how do you create one?

A brand style guide serves as the superhero cape for your brand, ensuring consistency, clarity, and cohesiveness across all touchpoints. It provides a unified voice, visual identity, and guidelines that help maintain brand integrity. To create one, start by defining your brand's personality, values, and target audience. Then establish guidelines for logo usage, typography, colors, imagery, tone of voice, and any other relevant elements. It's like crafting a roadmap that keeps your brand on track and helps you avoid any unintentional fashion faux pas.

If you're wondering why having a brand style guide is important, the answer is simple. It's because your brand is a reflection of your identity. It's not just a logo, a tagline, or some fancy design elements. It's the way you communicate, the way you interact with your customers, and the way you make them feel. And to do that successfully, you need to have consistency across all platforms and touch points. A brand style guide ensures that every aspect of your brand is aligned, from your colors, typography, and imagery, to your voice, tone, and messaging. It makes your brand instantly recognizable, builds trust, and ultimately helps you to stand out in a crowded marketplace.

Think of it as a recipe book! What ingredients in what quantity will cook that certain dish? What elements in which style will make up that certain brand? The logo; it's usage; the colour palette; the typography; the imagery; the brand tone etc.. Only the right amount of each element from this book will create the brand that was originally envisioned!

A brand style guide give you consistency, making sure all visual and verbal communication assets always have the same look and feel. This consistency is vital for creating a strong and recognizable brand.

I personally recommend starting off with Pinterest by creating a mood board. Pinterest has the best algorithm out of all the existing platforms to look up the right visuals and a neat way of compiling it all as saved/uploaded Pins in a Board (with more recommendations showing up according to this evolving Board). Once you have a mood board, it is up to your convenience and skill whether you want to start with online design tools like Canva or professional, classic design softwares like Adobe Photoshop (or Figma, if you are trendy, jk).

When building brand books for clients, I always include "HOW NOT TO" guidelines and examples when it comes to logo placements, colour combinations and tone of voice in action.

If you still have some confusion, ask Bing Chat (basically any online tool using OpenAI's ChatGPT) or Google it if you are old school.

One of my effective quality control techniques is a reward system for implementation of the right usage and detection of the wrong usage of the brand guidelines. This way, the quality control is not restricted to one department since it has been decentralised; more eyes to detect deviations leading to less overall deviations!

Do not forget to take inspirations from various sources before starting or when you get stuck during the process. And remember, inspiration can come from anywhere!