How to implement a Simple Style Guide for Your Business

Your business produces alot of outputs - letters, reports, emails, websites, articles, etc - and through each of these outputs it provides you with the opportunity to re-enforce the brand of your business. A style guide is a document that provides the basic rules of features that allow you to ensure consistency across your outputs - creating a consistent user experience that brings increased levels of brand recognition.

In essence, a Style Guide can help your business by bringing all your documents (and your website) into a consistent layout. As such, it allows you to re-enforce your brand in each document, email, letter, etc to allow consistency across your business. This consistency can assist in creating a better and more consistent user experience across your physical and digital presence - allowing your documents and website to ultimately perform better.

Your style guide should look to address the following:

• The logo and how it should be used;
• Font styles (and formatting);
• Colour, size and font for headings;
• Images to be used;
• Placement and size of logos etc;
• ... and more

Once you have addressed these issues you can look to develop templates for letters, emails, reports and web pages that reflects these design choices. By ensuring all future documents follow this style, you are building your brand image and creating a consistent layout that is likely to build your brand recognition.

Here's some examples of a Visual Style Guide:

• http://www.behance.net/gallery/Kluwer-Memos-Styleguide/1613143
• I(Love)NY Style Guide

If you would like to develop a style guide for your business, contact us and we can put you in touch with designers that can be of assistance to you.

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