What is a Personal Brand Style?

A Personal brand style guide is your brand’s rulebook that puts into writing all the specifications of your branding strategy, including your brand story, logo, colour palette, typography, and more. You can think of your brand’s style as a reference point that people can use a guide for representing your brand.

There are 6 key elements of a brand style guide:

1. Brand story

2. Brand voice

3. Logo

4. Imagery

5. Colour palette

6. Typography

 

Why You Need a Brand Style?

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Every business needs a brand style guide to establish the consistency of their brand’s image. Branding is about building up public perception, something that can only be achieved when you communicate a clear, unified message about who your company or organisation is.

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The more consistent your brand image, the more customers will resonate with your company. Maybe you’ll make them laugh, or resolve their frustrations and fears. Maybe you’ll inspire them and encourage them to be better. Maybe they’ll feel valued and fulfilled by supporting a company that’s committed to causes they believe in.

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Together, the above 6 elements—your story, voice, logo, colour palette, imagery, and typography—shape your brand. We create a brand style guide so you can put these specifications into writing. This builds the consistency you need to cultivate your brand’s image, connect with customers, and stand apart from the competition.

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How we Create a Brand Style Guide in 6 Steps?

 

1. Putting your story into visual.

A brand story is one of the six main components of your brand style guide. A brand story is a narrative about your company that centres on your company’s values and reasons for existence. A typical brand story includes your company’s origins, the problem it sets out to solve, the mission and values it carries forward, and its vision for the future.

Your brand story sets the tone for your company’s decision-making process within the organization. It also guides the way you interact with your customers and helps you resonate with customers who identify with your mission and values.

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2. Identifying your brand voice.

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In addition to including your brand story in your style guide, you’ll want to include your brand voice. Your brand voice is another defining element of your brand; it’s the way you speak with your audience, and the personality traits and values you imply as a result.

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One example of a compelling brand voice is that of Dove, which aims to be uplifting and empowering in its web copy and ad content. “At Dove, we have a vision of a world where beauty is a source of confidence, not anxiety,” the brand coos. Dove’s brand voice is friendly, inspirational, encouraging, and soothing, and the reason its voice is so powerful is precisely because the brand sticks to this voice so consistently across its copy.

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To define your brand voice, we need you to come up with a handful of words that best describe your brand. Are you quirky and light-hearted, or serious and authoritative? Choose words that best define you, and write using the language and tone that reflects these characteristics. We include your brand voice in your style guide so that people use a consistent voice across all written company materials.

 

3. Defining your logo.

 

The third component of your brand style guide is your logo. Your logo is the basis for many people’s first impression of your brand, so it needs to be something that communicates what you do and who you are.

 

We communicate this message through a combination of your logo’s overall format, icons, typography, colour palette, and layout. We take note of how your logo should appear across coloured, black, and white backgrounds, and are clear about any colour variations you’ll need to apply for different backgrounds.

 

We have a clear set of brand style guidelines—especially when it comes to defining logo. For example, your logo should appear red on a white background, and should appear white on a background of any other colour. This consistency is important for building your brand’s authority and recognition.

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4. Determining your brand colour palette

 

We include samples of their exact brand colors, in addition to all the information needed to reproduce these colours on any medium:

HSL – Hue, Saturation, Lightness

CMYK – Color to use for print

Hex – Color to use for digital

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5. Specify font guidelines

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We give details of the fonts and their ratio propotions required for a coherent design. We provide with all the font combinations required for a particular project.

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6. Image guidelines.

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To create your image guidelines, we start by selecting the best performing images on your site or which are best suited to the proposal. 

Are they inspirational? Quirky? Professional? Taking notes on the shared traits of your best-performing images, we use that as a set of guidelines in your style guide.

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How long does it take to form a brand style?

It takes a couple of weeks to form a coherent brand style.

Every company, big or small, needs a brand style guide to define and outline the different components of their branding strategy.