What exactly is a style guide, and how can your company’s communication efforts benefit from creating and implementing one?
A style guide is a set of writing and design standards that should be applied to create a cohesive look and feel among all written communications for a particular company, brand or industry.
Style guides, sometimes referred to as branding and style guides or manuals, can be particularly helpful from a human resources perspective for new hires, or for directing agencies or other creative partners that need to quickly absorb a brand’s identity.
The concept isn’t purely aesthetic, however — style guides can bump your company’s content quality to the next level, save time and money with fewer rounds of editing and establish an “authority” on matters that might typically contribute to bottlenecks with emails and approval chains.
If you have never thought about a style guide as a tool for your company or brand, here are some topics that might typically be included:
- logos (e.g., are there different logo versions that should be used for specific types of communication)
- colors: exact Pantone colors that comprise your company’s logo, which should be incorporated with any other design work
- fonts: name of font style(s) for headlines versus body content, with size specifications
- digital letterhead, email signatures and other personal identifiers (e.g., is there a different letterhead version for each division of your company, is there a specific way email signatures should be formatted)
- nationally recognized style guide your company will follow: the two most commonly used, depending on your industry, are probably Associated Press or Chicago Manual of Style
- specific ways your company name should be formatted: capital versus lowercase for certain words, hyphens, accents or other special characters
- industry-specific trade words or phrases that should be referred to consistently
- style preferences within your company that may differ from the national style guides (e.g., your chief marketing officer adopts AP style as a general rule but refuses to let go of the Oxford or serial comma)
These are just a sampling of the sorts of things that keep style purists employed and content editors up at night.
To make your style guide an impactful tool, make sure your company designates a “brand tzar” who ensures the guide is actively used across all levels of the company, and who is responsible for routinely updating the guide’s content to change with the times.
While following a style guide may seem restrictive of individual personalities that create a brand’s content, when employed properly, a style guide can actually empower a brand’s voice and personality and enable the brand to own a unique space among its competitors — while still being fun.
You can run wild aligning your company with your brand, going so far as to provide color-coded calendar entries utilizing your brand’s colors, or you could even design or license your own custom font!
Have fun brainstorming, get inspired and take a peek at style guides for some major brands here.
At Shift Key, we make communication capital. We are journalists who know how to create original content, the foundational layer of digital marketing. We understand audience and the information your audience wants – whether you are an agency, brand, company or non-profit. Content is the bedrock of digital marketing. Shift Key creates unique and informative content that feeds marketing activities across a mounting number of channels, generating buzz for brands and leads for products and services.