What is a Branding Style Guide and Why is it Important?
Every organization needs a branding style guide as it defines how to and how not to use branding of your organization. Typically, a branding style guide is a document that describes and defines rules about how your organization branding looks on the internet, print and any other visual media.
A branding style guide could be used for many purposes, such as:
- Sales
- Marketing
- Affiliate program
- Development
Many organizations do not take the time to define their style guide and end up having their branding inconsistent or incorrect, which can cause confusion amongst your clients and customers.
When marketing your organization, it is very important to have a branding style guide to keep the consistency of your brand. Therefore, if someone is creating content for your organization, you can provide them the branding style guide so the content that they are generating are consistent with your branding.
Here are some of the leading organizations’ style guides for your reference:
Many of the branding style guides includes a web guideline as well.
Why are Web Guidelines Important when Building your Company Website?
When you are building your organization’s website, it is crucial to have web guidelines on your branding style guide. Then, the web designer will know exactly how to incorporate your organization’s branding into your website design by following your guidelines when building the website. If you currently do not have a website style guide, you can easily create one to reflect your branding style guide.
Website guidelines commonly contain the following components:
- Logo - Example of how to use your organization logo.
- Typography - Font type, font sizes for different elements, spacing, etc.
- Layouts and grids – We recommend sticking with the 12-column grids as many of the frontend frameworks uses 12 column grids. Here are some of the leading frontend frameworks that you we recommend:
- Icons – We recommend using icon libraries, here are some of the free icon libraries
- Colours – These include the primary colours of your branding.
- Photography – Select specific photography, and use brand colors in the photograph whenever possible to ensure the consistency and flow.
- Other components – These could be buttons, dropdowns, forms, etc.
Here are some examples of organizations that clearly define their organization web guidelines.
In conclusion, it is important to have a branding style guide for your organization. This will help you in the long run as all internal and external use of your brand will rely on the same branding style guide, which will lead to consistency of your branding throughout all communications and media.
The Portal Connector's Drag and Drop interface makes it easier than ever to build forms and pages, allowing you to visually see what the end result will be. Page templates can be applied to any web page, enabling you to easily manage your company's style and branding.
The Portal Connector is built upon Progress Sitefinity Content Management System (CMS). Sitefinity includes a variety of pre-built templates out of the box. These templates can always be customized to your organization's branding and style requirements. You can find Sitefinity documentation resources for managing page templates using Sitefinity Feather here.