Why even smaller businesses should invest in a brand identity style guide
Your brand essentially acts as your business’ personality, and it has never been more important. Consumers want to be able to engage with brands, so having only a logo and a basic colour scheme just scratches the surface of creating a dialogue with your customers and clients.
And so we come to the concept of a brand identity style guide.
A brand identity style guide outlines a set of rules and guidelines as to how your brand is to be used – think of it like a roadmap for your brand. There is no limit to what it can include, but as a minimum, it should feature sections on typography, logo usage, editorial tone of voice and corporate colour scheme.
What are the benefits of a brand identity style guide?
There are lots. Perhaps the most important benefit of establishing a style guide is to ensure consistency and continuity in the way in which your business is perceived by the public.
The suit maketh the man, and so does your branding. If you want people to take your business seriously and pay you appropriately, make sure your business is dressed to impress.
If you are a small business, there is a good chance you don’t employ an in-house marketing or creative team. This means that you will most likely outsource design work to a variety of different agencies and suppliers. If there is no style guide in place, external designers are basically flying blind.
Over time this will result in multiple pieces of visual communication which all look slightly different. This not only dilutes the strength of your brand, but also looks unprofessional. After all, if you don’t take your branding seriously, why should potential customers?
A style guide can save you money? How?
This is one of those cases of spending money to save money.
Time Savings. A style guide saves time by providing quick answers to questions that may arise while creating new documents. “What information should be included?” or “What happens if there is two of our brands together on the one page?”. A style guide makes the process of composition quicker and more efficient, thus significantly reducing the time required to create new documents. This means there will be fewer revisions and in almost every case, a higher quality outcome.
In a nutshell: fewer revisions = lower design costs.
Cost Savings. Staff with access to their company’s style guide spend fewer hours creating briefs, writing, reviewing, and correcting documentation. As new staff join the organisation, less time is required to get them up to speed.
Consistency. A style guide promotes consistency among documents throughout the company. This leads to fewer arguments over questions of style and format and to less duplicated effort, resulting in savings of both time and money.
Professionalism. Externally, your company enhances its image by developing and using an effective time- and money-management tool and by consistently producing quality documentation. The more professional you appear the higher costs you can expect to charge for your work.
OK, I’m sold. How much will a style guide cost me and where can I get one?
You know what the answer to this is, right? Of course it will depend on how detailed your style guide is, but as a ball park figure you should prepare for anywhere from $2000 – $20,000 depending on the complexity of your business needs.
If you would like to know more about how a brand identity style guide will help your business, please drop us a line.
Examples of Colour Andre Style Guide and Brand Identity work
References: Some of this article has been reference from excellent articles on the same topic by horgancreative.com.au & awrittenword.com
Tagged with: Andre, Brand, branding, Colour, Colours, Consistency, Fonts, Guide, Identity, Logo, Marketing, Melbourne, Style, Style Guide, Sydney
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