A Style Guide for Your Company

Every company should have a style guide that designers adhere to. For all of the vendors you use throughout your business you should have a style guide that you point them to. From getting a sign on your car, letterhead, and of course website needs.

I am going to start out simple and focus on four important areas:

1. Color
2. Trademarks
3. Fonts
4. Images

Style Guide Color

Most companies are known by their colors whether they want to or not. Coke Red, Pepsi Red, White, and Blue, UPS Brown, Google primary. If you traveled to another country the branding of these companies make them feel very familiar. If there look were dramatically changed I would question whether or not I was getting the real thing.(Sorry had to)

From business cards, invoices, to websites it is important that branding is laid out to give your customers familiarity with you to build the trust that you have in your products or services.

Trademarks

List all trademarks with files.

Create a master document that everyone in your company has access to. Your employees will be able to utilize it for something as simple as creating an email signature.

Fonts

Use the name of the fonts you use for logo, website, and other collateral. Use the hexadecimal numbers for your colors so you can use them in any application.

If you have special fonts and licenses to them provide the name and file of the font in a folder with the master document.

Images

Also in the folder include .jpg, transparent .gif and .png of logos and trademarks. Put the originals in for printers. Any special logos you have made, even little changes for special projects like a St. Patricks green marketing effort. Keep all collateral named appropriately in one main folder that has the backup system in place.

You will use this folder over and over and it will create calmness with your designers and vendors when they need something that is being created for the company.

This is one of those folders that you want to make sure is backed up very well, onsite and offsite of your company’s offices. It is very easy to do this with a lot of services and worth more than any time you would put into it.

Follow up and make sure you have source files from your vendors and get them into this folder. We have built this into our services and make it a la cart whenever our clients need to access their files. Phone call and who they want us to send them to in what format and all is taken care of.

So the next time you need to use your branding online or digital remember to always have the place that is always accessible. It will be that much easier and help you keep a uniform style.

A better web,
Brandon Roach