Creative Director of ArtVersion, a Chicago design consultancy. We craft ideal user experiences for the world’s most innovative companies.
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When you think of many famous brands, immediate recognizability and memorability can be meteoric. Instant recognizability is a fundamental aspect that many brands strive for. Whether emerging or established, an omnipresent influence and impact can be achieved with a successful brand identity to galvanize audiences into converting to your service. Yet, to further the reach of a brand comes individual associations, generalizations and even misconceptions of what a brand stands for. For a universal understanding of how your brand wishes to establish its story, build guidelines to stabilize the undulation of perceptions with a clear—and, most importantly, consistent—brand identity.
Tell Your Brand Story Your Way
One of the beneficial aspects of brand guidelines, also interchangeable with a brand style guide, is the opportunity for brands to describe their brand identity with an all-encompassing document. Yes, modernly there are a plethora of ways for brands to present themselves to the world in the way they wish to be perceived—social media, websites, apps, marketing collateral, interactions with their audiences, etc.— but brand guidelines function as a brand’s bible.
Brand guidelines contain the story of a brand, or the “why” to uncovering its ethos, styles, tonality and UI assets such as logos and how to utilize them, color stories, typography, imagery, graphical treatments and more. Clear consistency within your brand is what essentially helps create recognizability with your audiences and within the industry. Brand guidelines are important to ensure your company is accurately portrayed to your audience and even competitors. From logo sizing and its surrounding negative space, you always want to ensure the front-facing elements of your brand are authentically represented.
Building your brand guidebook helps effectively establish your company’s story, its representation and audience. Striking the balance between expressing your company story with a visually appealing brand book is just another layer in punctuating your brand distinctiveness, and there is a limitless way to achieve that.
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Consider Collaboration
Seeking a digital design agency to elevate your brand book is often a great starting point. Designers have keen insights on how to handle key assets, while also keeping them optimized and highly rendered. In our own design agency, handling UI elements such as logos, color, typography and imagery are embedded into a brand guideline to showcase all the important features of how to utilize these assets. Details on logo sizing, font treatments and imagery style are captured in full, distinct detail.
Not only is working with a design agency a productive method to enrich your brand guideline, but it can also offer your team a refreshing take on design features from a clear outside perspective. Design agencies can tap into ideas your company may have not thought of utilizing, which helps uncover new contours of your identity while remaining authentic to an established look and feel.
Prioritize Your Story
Although brand guidelines are often quite imagery heavy, prioritizing your brand story helps your audience form a much more concrete brand ethos. Once you put your brand out into the world, every consumer may create their own associations with your brand if your brand identity isn’t clear. Thus, to ensure a clear delineation of your story, prioritize what parts of your brand you wish to convey and the tone in which to convey it.
To introduce an emerging brand, your brand guidelines can include your overall story. Establishing tonality here sets the marker for how your brand is then perceived, which you have total control of in this stage. Or, for established companies, your brand guidelines can include your familiar overall story but offer a refreshing angle along with that familiarity to capture a new sense of dimension.
Tone ascertains the way your audience will experience your products and services as well. For example, automotive companies are much more assertive and confident, while say, a hospitality brand leans much more toward conversation and upbeat tonality. Reflecting on the way you wish your audience to grasp your brand personality and values in your brand guidelines can help build connection and recognizability.
Align With Other Design Pillars
Outside of the user interface and user experience (UI/UX) realm, many may consider branding as an isolated part that exists away from a digital design. However, it is one of the many pillars that make up an overarching design system and complete brand image. In fact, brand guidelines, when properly created, need to align with all visual assets found on your website, social media, mobile applications and marketing collateral.
Consistent branding informs the way a digital product will align with the overall brand identity; thus, it is imperative to align visual assets and content building in a brand guideline that mirrors all other brand assets. As stated, interconnectivity results in consistency. With that said, sometimes a brand’s website and application will have a website refresh, and to truly punctuate consistency and recognizability, it is always best never to neglect new changes in your brand guidelines as well.
Brand guidelines are an essential asset for any company, and although informative, they also open up a new opportunity to creatively and innovatively share your brand story.
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Author: Goran Paun, Forbes Councils Member
