How to Create a Brand Style Guide?

a brand guide is a rule book that explains how an organization presents itself to the world through its logo type colors images and much more join me and find out how well-known brands define their identity and assure consistency of their appearance and tonal voice this video will be the perfect place to start if you are planning to create a brand guide for one of your clients or a brand that you are developing [Music] yourself most of the guides i'm going to show you in this video are from the site called brandingstyleguides.com the link is in the description below make sure you check it out you can create a free account and once you have that you can download the pdf guides now some of these guys might not be the most up-to-date or most recent version for the brand that you are looking for nevertheless they can be still perfect to use as references and examples if you are planning to create a brand guide yourself i like the fact that you can search based on the year of publication here on the top where you have the filters based on languages the size of the document even countries where it was used and even tags or if you know a brand that you're looking for you can just type it here in the search area now first let's take a look at adobe's 2018 guide which is quite an extensive one so it's around 80 pages long and of course for these type of documents it's good to have a table of contents where you can indicate the structure of the guide but you can also incorporate hyperlinks here if it's an interactive pdf which is quite simple to build in indesign for example so that means we can also just click on any of these entries and we can jump straight to that page within the guide and that is actually already a consideration you have to make in the beginning whether you would like to build your guide mainly for print or for digital use in recent years i'm seeing more and more companies going towards having their style guides and assets all online in an interactive format and they might not even have a pdf or a printed version available a good example for this is google's visual asset guidelines for which again the link is in the description below and this is actually on behance so you can find it it's in two parts and it goes through all the different details from icons how they are generated and created and also how they are supposed to be used so how can you decide which format works better for you or for the brand that you're working with in my opinion an online interactive guideline might work better for more digital companies while companies where there will be a lot of stationeries and physical products like packaging as well it is better to have a printed guide which of course can always be available as an interactive pdf at the same time now coming back to adobe's brand guide we can see clearly that the first chapter focuses on the mission values and the tenants which are the basic principles of the company and this is a very important section so whenever you work with a brand or a company and you are creating a guide you really need to get to know them before you start working on the guide so you need to know where they are at the moment where they are heading what is their target audience what is their tone of voice and in general what's the brand's personality here's another example the national geographic brand guide again if we take a look at the table of contents once again it starts with our brand then it goes into brand behavior and only after that it starts talking about the ingredients or elements used in the visuals for this brand if you take a closer look at this introductory section it's good to start with the mission which is usually about why the company exists and what's its purpose and this is most of the time is the present of the company but then you can move into the vision or the future ideas or where the brand wants to move and what its ultimate goals are and in general in this section it's good to have adjectives used that can define the brand like here we have premium science adventure exploration and destination which perfectly describes and encapsulates the brand now in some guys you will also have the opposite of this things that the branding is not about which can also be useful for further clarification usually after the brand story is covered we would move into the elements or ingredients and probably the most important and most well-known part of that is the logo now again it depends on the complexity of the brand this can sometimes be a single page but sometimes it can end up being a whole chapter so let's take a closer look at national geographic's logo so first of all we have the yellow icon on its own that frame which is really well recognized and then we have the lockup with the text next to it and notice the amount of white space or negative space used on this page so the page is not crowded and cluttered it really focuses on the elements and what they are used for also it's a good practice to build the guide itself using the fonts that are applied to the brand and even the colors we can already see that on this page and it really just unifies the whole brand experience on the second page we have more information about the tagline which is further how it can be used in different formats and also how much space is necessary between the main logo and the tagline then we move into a section which explains how not to use the logo this is also very common and a great way to make sure that all the partners and everyone who is going to work with the brand will end up using it the way it was meant to be used this is the part i normally call don't mess with our logo and then we have a couple of additional examples again variations on how not to mess up the logo and then we reach the next section which is also very crucial for most brands it's color and in case of national geography it's quite simple we have the black and the yellow but with other brands this can be a little bit more complex like with the animal planet brand guide from 2008 explains that there are 10 different color variations besides the black and white version of the logo and out of these this yellowish green tone is the hero color so that's like the primary color usage while the others are more supporting colors these can also sometimes be referred to as primary and secondary colors and in case of british airways for example there's even a chart showing the percentage or priority of the colors associated with the brand so the blue is definitely their hero color followed by white then red and then finally by gray and they can also have an inverted palette where white becomes the primary color followed by blue red and then again finally by gray having a percentage or a comparative chart that shows the difference between the usage of colors is always useful because it really helps again to understand how to work with the brand as a designer it's a similar thing with the brand guide for american red cross where once again we have the different versions of the logo and then we reach the color area where we see the primary secondary palette and there's also a neutral part but more importantly we have the color proportion here once again showing that white is the most important color and then with the size it's nicely representing the proportions or the hierarchy between the colors now it is important to remember that brand guides are not all about visuals it's also about things like the tone of voice and since we are here i really like how the red cross explains that how we talk is just as important as what we talk about so that's a great statement to start with and then it's followed by these headlines uplifting inviting empowering personal and by the way this brand guide is a single poster so all the information that's relevant are compressed into this one single piece now there might be also a more extended version of the brand guide but it's also a good thing to keep in mind that it is possible to use a single page and still have all the relevant information included so that's another thing that you need to keep in mind and you have to make sure that you have the same understanding with your client so even though they are a small company their brand guidelines might be a long document because they would like to specify a lot of things while other companies might be huge but they are happy with a smaller brand guide that really focuses on the important aspects of what they would like to define as standards so what you as a designer need to pay attention to is the level of restriction and it is a fine balance between keeping a brand flexible allowing some creativity and freedom in how you use its assets but being rigid enough to keep the brand recognizable and consistent before we continue i just wanted to let you know about our creative membership program for a small monthly fee you get access to over 200 hours of adobe certified online training courses master all the tools and skills needed to become a professional graphic designer or illustrator as a pro member you will get mentoring from me and my team access to webinars student forum and creative briefs to help you build an outstanding portfolio pro members can also download the project files for all of our youtube tutorials sign up at the simodesigner.com memberships and start your free trial today and now let's head back to the tutorial now another big section in most brand guides would be about imagery and especially with very visual brands like national geographic this is of course crucial so it's interesting to see what are the three main filters that they use for choosing the right images whenever they want to represent the brand first one is that they need to always have a human element so they want to maintain that and avoid just showing landscapes without any human representation the next key concept is immersion so they want you to really feel like you are present and you are in that place that they are showing and stuff like that can really help to choose the right type of compositions for the brand and last but not least further which you might recall was their tagline as well it's about vast spaces so a lot of negative space used besides the subject or salient details within the photographs similarly to images type usually also gets its own chapter within a brand guide in case of national geography it starts with the main font and the second refund most brands would usually work with a font family that can be extensive and have several different variations which will allow flexibility in the editing but of course it's also common practice like with national geographic that there is a main font and the secondary font and these two are very specifically selected to work well together as a pair now for visual brands it's also sometimes good to lay down the rules of how to combine type and imagery together so here we can see some examples of type over light backgrounds and we even have a separate page on how to do color correction on imagery to make sure that we have enough contrast to maintain good legibility on the text and then sometimes we also have actual compositions including the brand guide just to further define how certain elements can be used like the logo or once again text and imagery together even if you are producing a printed brand guide when the brand uses a lot of motion graphics it's also important to keep that in mind and include in your guide once again with national geographic of course because it's a tv channel there would be a lot of motion graphics used and in this chapter we can see how the logo should appear in footages so we have a very specific placement also very specific negative space around the logo and the titles and every detail is clearly defined here once again to make sure that it is always used consistently now most of the times when an agency or a designer works on the brand guide they should also provide templates and for motion graphics it would most likely be an after effects template or premiere template by for print most of the time it would be an indesign file with master pages and everything prepared and these templates most of the time would be for in-house use but sometimes they can also be given out to partners almost all brand guys would have separate sections for the different types of collaterals and the main categories are usually digital and print so we already seen a couple of digital examples and here are a few printed examples for national geographic we have first the stationary overview then we have a focus on business cards both the front and the back and then we have letterheads envelopes and then we even have the email signature defined here however that's digital it still works well next to the letterheads and stationaries the appearance of the brand on social media should also be a separate chapter in most brand guys these days and we can see that perfectly in the national geographic brand guide so we have facebook twitter youtube next to each other showing first the headers then we have a little bit more about the headers detail instances of the channel graphics on mobile and then a couple of social post templates and banners and even presentation slides now of course probably the most important one for the digital assets is going to be the website so there will most likely be several pages about that and how certain landing pages should be created and even rules about the navigation or the general layout of pages and at this point i wanted to mention that in the past brand guides could work for decades like this brand guide for nasa is from 1976 and it was in use for a long time however brands nowadays change their appearance quite often following certain trends in graphic design but that is not an excuse of having completely new brand guides released yearly i think longevity is an important factor of a good brand guide which can serve the company for many years to come after it's been created and that is all i wanted to cover in this video i hope you found it useful and in the future i'm planning to do more deep dive videos on logo design and of course if you have any questions about the things that i covered please leave a comment below and i will try my best to answer thanks a lot for watching like and share this video if you enjoyed it don't forget to subscribe and hit the bell icon to get notified whenever we release new videos click on the link on my right and start your membership today to get access to over 200 hours of training courses and personal mentoring by me and my team of creative professionals have fun learning guys and i will see you in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Yes I'm a Designer

Views: 56,310

Rating: 4.9719973 out of 5

Keywords: How to Create a Brand Style Guide?, logo, branding, brand design, graphics, brand strategy, business, marketing, graphicdesign, designer, designlife, designstudio, design, brandidentity, colours, marketingcollateral, brand managament, visual content, marketing materials, brand identity design tutorial, how to create a brand identity, brand identity design, brand image examples, what is a brand identity, brand identity, brand identity design process, creating a brand identity, identity design

Id: ofFyRI6ROTI

Length: 15min 30sec (930 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 14 2020