Creating Consistency in Visual Branding: The Power of Brand Style Guides (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Welcome back for another episode of my business and branding series. I'm Mariah, the owner and creative director of Mariah Rionna Branding. This month's topic is visual branding, and today I'm talking all about how to create consistency throughout your visual branding system. More specifically, I'll be sharing about brand style guides. Consistency is key. The whole point of your visual branding system is to build brand recognition and trust with your audience. When you have consistency throughout your visual branding system, your audience starts to feel familiar with your brand aesthetic, they start to know what to expect, and that makes them feel comfortable with you. If your visuals are inconsistent, even in one seemingly small situation, it can feel really jarring and start to deteriorate that hard-earned trust that you've worked to build with your clients and your audience. But don't worry, I'm going to share my secret weapon for ensuring consistency across all of my clients' visual branding systems. The brand style guide. One of the last steps in my branding experience is to create a custom style guide for each one of my clients. A brand style guide is exactly what it sounds like. It's a document that provides guidelines for how to properly execute their new brand system and visuals. Everything from logo usage to fonts and brand colors are covered in this guide. When you have a brand style guide, you can refer back to it to make sure that you're consistently staying on brand. And as your business grows, you can share this document with virtual assistants, employees, and other contractors to make sure they're staying on brand as well. The elements of a perfect brand style guide. My brand style guides cover three main areas. The first is logo usage. I cover a lot of different topics, one including logo sizing. For example, there's a minimum size I suggest for each of my clients' logos. If they go smaller than that, the logo becomes illegible. The second is buffer space. And this is basically the room, the breathing room that your logo needs. When I first started my business, I would design logo files and just hand them off to clients without any sort of guideline or style guide. And then I'd see them cram their logos into the tightest spaces, or they'd make them really crowded with other graphics and images, and it just became really convoluted. It's really important that you give your logo room to breathe when you're using it. When it's too crowded, it loses significance. The next point I touch on in my brand style guides are the brand colors. I just did a video on brand colors, so if you want more information about that, go check it out. I've linked it down below. In my style guides, I list that specific brand's brand colors, and then I provide the color codes for each color mode so that they can always stay on brand. For my clients, this is typically RGB, CMYK, and hexadecimal colors. And the third and final point that I touch on in my clients' brand style guides is the typography. So I go over their brand fonts again, explain which fonts they are. Usually I have two to three. Now I've got a video all about brand fonts, also linked down below if you want to check that out. I kind of explain how I pick the fonts and what the best fonts are for your brand. So we've already done that with my client, and so in the brand style guide, we go back over what the fonts are, and then I tell them how to use the fonts in the various situations. So for example, I tell them when you have a title, your title's always going to be this font, it's going to be this size, this color. In contrast, your body copy, or the small fine print on your website or whatever, is going to be this size, it's going to be this font, and it's going to be this color. This way they're always consistent with their brand fonts. To recap, maintain consistency with your visual branding, and you'll build trust with your audience. To do this, create your own brand style guide with detailed rules for logo usage, typography, and brand colors. Thanks for joining me today. Be sure to grab my Brand Blueprint, a 20-page workbook to help you build a super solid foundation for your brand. I've linked that down below, so go check it out. And I'll see you here next time.