Style Guides Matter. Here’s Why.
Keeping a consistent style is everything when building and maintaining a positive relationship with your customers. Style guides play an essential role in ensuring accurate brand association and building trust with your audience. When potential customers explore your website, they expect uniformity.
Imagine being on Amazon; you’re scrolling through the Daily Deals and then click on the Best Sellers tab. As you do this, you notice the colors change and the typeface changes to Comic Sans. You find it weird and start to wonder if you are on a scam site so you quickly exit your browser. This scenario probably sounds unlikely, given how well-known Amazon is, but it is something you often see on less established websites. It leads potential customers to lose trust, and the chances of them converting into a client reduce.
Let’s take a closer look at what a style guide is and why your business needs one.
The Role of Style Guides
A style guide is a set of standards and guidelines for your brand. To produce high-quality content, it is essential to have guidelines for your marketing, User Experience (UX), and User Interface (UI) teams to follow. Organizations of any size can benefit from a style guide; however, keeping content consistent becomes more difficult as your organization grows. Establishing a style guide early on will benefit the organization both internally and externally.
Just like we share company visions and values with all employees to make sure everyone works towards the same goal, it is imperative also to share a style guide to ensure that our messages are spread in the way we want. You can think of the style guide being the conductor of your brand voice, much like a conductor in an orchestra. If all the instruments played to the rhythm of their own beat, it would sound like a jumbled mess of sounds that no one wants to listen to, but when you have the conductor leading the orchestra, you get a beautiful symphony that amuses the audience and entices them for more.
What Are Style Guides Used For?
Style guides are used across the organization for everyone to reference. It shows the content team how to write, the design team what colors and fonts to use, the programmers how to style the website and the sales team how the slide deck be structured.
What Formats Do Style Guides Take?
A style guide has many formats, logos, coding requirements, writing samples, and PowerPoint templates. The role of the style guide is to include everything that is needed to produce consistent messaging across the whole company.
5 Elements of a Style Guide
The most common elements in a style guide are approved logos, typeface, color palette, image sizes, and tone and voice.
1. Logo
Your logo is how your customers recognize your company. As such, it’s important to have high-quality image files of your logo readily available in your style guide so that your employees don't have to wait for the files to be sent or have to search it up on Google. A good tip here is to include multiple variants of your logo and a guide describing how the company wants the different variants used.
2. Typeface
Just like we described earlier in this article, having a consistent typeface is a crucial part of building trust with customers. You’ll want to include any typeface used in your logo, marketing material, and website pages in your style guide. Remember to separate the fonts used for titles and the ones used in the body. Include any formatting preferences you have for the different materials.
3. Color Palette
When we say color palette, we’re not talking about the general colors like blue, red, and green or the names of the colors associated with the company; we mean the exact shade of that color and where we use them. Include all the colors with hex codes and a list of uses for that color.
4. Image Sizes
Image sizes include the specifics for each image on your site. How small can your logo be in relation to other elements on the page? Do you have standard sizes for thumbnails and header images? Be sure to address these common questions in your style guide clearly.
5. Tone and Voice
Who is your target audience, and how would you like them to view your brand? This is what needs to be documented in your style guide under the tone and voice section. Do you have a highly technical product used by many engineers? If so, it might be fitting to have a more serious writing style that is straightforward. On the other hand, if your product is an interactive game for kids, your tone and voice would sound more upbeat and fun. Your text can include more fluff and descriptive diction to go along with your fun brand image.
For reference, Forbes has their style guide posted online. Check it out to see an example of the format of most style guides.
What’s Next?
Now that you know what a style guide is and why it is important, you may be wondering where to go from here. If you do not already have one, it would be wise to start building your own style guide for your company. If you already have one, it could be worth revisiting and revising it to get even more specific.
If you find yourself wondering how you will make the time to create a style guide and, ultimately, more content, we recommend partnering with a marketing agency. Marketing agencies like Comma, partner with you every step of the way to produce high-quality, curated content.
Have a question about style guides or producing content for your company? Connect with Comma today. Book your free consultation now.