5 Essential Elements to Include in a Style Guide

A style guide is an important step in the design process for ensuring a consistent and aesthetically appealing visual style across all platforms where your business and brand show up. This can foster trust and transparency as well as make your brand memorable, which is great for converting leads into paying customers/clients and fostering brand loyalty.

If you're planning to go through a full brand strategy and design process, I'd recommend starting off by defining your business' core values, mission, target audience, and value proposition (how does your product or service deliver value to your customers/clients) prior to moving forward with your style guide.

In this blog post, we'll discuss five elements to include along with tips and ways to use your style guide to inform your designs. Although these tips and examples provide a general overview and are a great way to get started and/or enhance your brand, they do not cover the full brand strategy & design process.

Style Guide - Direction

Think of your style direction as a description that will guide the overall aesthetic (look and feel) of your user interface and visual style across your company's platforms. This description will inform other elements of your style guide such as colors, typography, images, and graphics.

Since I have a personal brand, I tailored my style direction to fit my business and how I want it to be perceived. If you have a larger business, you will want to tailor your style direction to the core values, mission, vision, and brand identity of your business as a whole. Below, you can see my style direction which includes a short description along with attributes that fit my brand.

Color Palette

Next, I'd recommend choosing a color palette that fits your style direction. I'd suggest choosing between 2-4 main colors. You can then add variations such as tints (adds white to the base color), shades (adds black to the base color), or tones (adds gray to the base color) to add variety without being visually overwhelming. In some cases, choosing extra accent colors can add visual interest when used in moderation.

My favorite tool for finding tints, shades, etc. is Coolors Color Picker. When you open this page, you can see the darker blue-green color from my website, Cerulean (Hex Code: #00698A). Scroll down to the "Variations" section, and you can see the corresponding shades, tints, tones, etc. and hover over the color to see the Hex code.

I'd love to share the color palette that I chose for this website. I started by selecting the light green color, then added cerulean, selected a pink color to compliment the greens, and chose a very dark green (almost black) for my text. Once I had selected those colors, I chose complimentary grays, tints of ash gray and lilac and accent colors. My accent colors are just used in a few graphics on my portfolio pages. I hope this provides some inspiration when starting to choose your design's colors!

For more tips on choosing a color palette for your website or design, you can visit my blog article, "Choosing a Color Palette for Your Website". This post includes more tips and resources for choosing a color palette. Enjoy!

Typography

Choosing fonts that fit your style direction and color palette can be an overwhelming task. But don't worry, there's lots of helpful online resources and guides. To get started, I'd recommend choosing 2 fonts. For your body copy or longer chunks of text, sans-serif (meaning without "serifs", or the small lines at the end of each letter), provides a modern look while also being easier to read than serif or script fonts. Choosing a contrasting font for your headlines, such as a display or serif font can add visual interest and hierarchy to your design.

If you want to learn more tips and best practices for typography, check out this article by Canva, "How to Use Fonts Effectively". Below, you can see a sample of the fonts that I used for my website.

If you're looking for more ideas, there are several resources I'd recommend that suggest font pairings and show mockups of what these fonts look like together.

Canva: "Canva's Ultimate Guide to Font Combinations"

Canva: "Build Your Brand: How to Choose the Right Fonts"

Adobe Fonts

Graphics & Iconography

Graphics and icons not only add visual interest and personality to your brand, but they should also be used to clearly convey meaning. It's important to consider your audience and if they will recognize your selection of graphics and icons. If you're selecting icons yourself or hiring a designer to select/create them, I'd recommend a few tips for efficiency and brand alignment:

• If you're using pre-created icons or graphics, download them as SVG (scalable vector graphics) files so they can be modified.

• Modify colors of icons/graphics so they match your brand's colors.

• Adjust the width/stroke of your icons so they're consistent, especially if used within proximity of each other, or within a set.

• Create a library of assets so that you can easily access these for use on other platforms.

You can see a sample of my brand's graphics and icons in the image below. I've stored, labeled and organized these along with other visual assets in Figma, folders on my computer, and folders on my website (Wix) for easy access.

A few other ideas for visual asset storage include Adobe Creative Cloud libraries, a shared drive in the cloud such as Google Drive, or build a brand kit in Canva. The best solution will depend on your business and the best way for your team to efficiently organize, access and collaborate around these assets.

Photography & Imagery

The right photographs and imagery can highlight the personality and tone of your brand as well as support your written content. Depending on your budget and products/services, there are several options for choosing your photographs:

• Hire a photographer

• Use free stock photos

• Use paid stock photos

• Take photos yourself

For my business, I've used personal photos (taken myself, or by family/friends) or free stock images. My favorite resources for stock photos are: Adobe Stock and Unsplash.

Final Thoughts

Creating a style guide takes time and effort, but it is an essential step in building a strong and cohesive brand. By following the tips in this blog post, you can start creating a style guide that will help you achieve a consistent and visually appealing look for your brand.

Here are some additional tips for using your style guide to inform your design:

• Use your style guide to create a brand kit. This is a collection of digital assets, such as logos, fonts, and colors, that can be easily accessed and used by your team.

• Use your style guide to create brand guidelines (set of rules and standards that define your brand). Create a living document or website where these can be updated regularly.

• Share your style guide with your entire team, including designers, developers, and content creators. This will ensure that everyone is on the same page and that your brand identity is consistently applied across all of your projects.

• Regularly review and update your style guide as your brand evolves. This will keep your style guide relevant and up-to-date.

• Create templates for your most common design elements, such as website pages, landing pages, and emails. This will save you time and effort in the long run.