Keeping Design Consistent with a Style Guide
So far we’ve discussed typography, colour, photography and your high-converting home page layout. Once you’ve nailed down all of these creative elements you then need to put the effort in to keeping it all seamless and consistent.
That’s where your brand style guide comes into play.
A style guide is a document that explicitly states how your brand should be represented visually in terms of logomarks, typography and brand colour palettes.
If you’ve never used or adhered to a style guide before I’m sure you’re well aware of the degenerating process your website and other creative material take. The first month everything looks great, but 12 months in and your brand has taken on a Frankenstein appearance and nothing is consistent or matches up. It’s in shambles.
The way to avoid this is to create a simple brand style guide that lays out strict rules and criteria for your logo, colours and typography.
Below is an example of a simple style guide template.
In your style guide you should include all of the different logo variations you use, including inverted logos and black and white logos, along with up to 5 brand colours (and their shades) and the fonts you’ve chosen to use in your branding.
Once you have your style guide built out, don’t let it sit on your hard drive to collect cyber dust. Instead, whenever you hire a new employee or contractor who are tasked with any creative work, make sure your style guide is the first thing they see.
When you, your employees and contractors work with your style guide your brand is guaranteed to stay consistent, seamless and beautiful for many years to come.
I sincerely hope you’ve enjoyed reading this post and that you’ll implement one, two or all of these design features into your own business and websites. If you do, I can guarantee you’ll only see positive results.
And remember, when your business reaches a certain level you should definitely consider hiring a pro designer to help you with all of this. I’m currently available for design work myself so please feel free to checkout my
AwesomeWeb profile and reach out with any questions you have.