Style guides are the unified & branded experience for applications. It is not a rule book but it states what is accepted and not accepted. It can be descriptive or just have images and snippets. It tells the developer/designer how to communicate with the client and makes it easier for different roles in an organization to do their job. Style Guides are responsible for your brand and branding. What is the difference between the brand & branding? The brand is your promise to the customers. Branding is how you communicate that promise.
The guides are made with the designers, content, branding & marketing teams, and after extensive user research.
Why Style-Guide?
Everything that is created should accurately represent the brand. However, the larger the team, the more difficult it can be to monitor content and ensure that everything is in working order. (Sometimes, it's not even the fault of the freelancer; in-house teams can be just as bad.)
This is why a brand style guide is essential. This not only ensures consistency but also benefits the brand in a variety of ways.
More quality control: Not every team has an Art Director on hand to review every project, and often is working against a deadline. These, and many other factors, can result in disjointed and ineffective content. The brand's reputation is based on the quality of the creative content, so having well-documented guidelines ensures that the content produced is something that the brand is proud of.
Improved understanding: Clear communication and smart design make your reader's or viewer's life easier. Guidelines for data visualization, color use, and typography help creators in creating more effective content, resulting in a better overall content experience. In addition, this little gesture is a huge help to the people you desire to connect with. It demonstrates that you value their time and are committed to helping them in obtaining the information they seek.
Improved brand recognition: Brand guidelines help you deliver a cohesive brand experience to your audience allowing them to better identify your valuable content. When you provide consistently high-quality content, your audience comes to depend on you and -even better - seeks out your content.
Ultimately, if you want to build a successful brand, you need a style guide.
Consistency is important because it creates trust. And Design is all about creating relationships between products and users.
In this blog, we will go over effective tactics for creating a reliant style guide. If you're a beginner who is having trouble creating and managing a style guide, here's what you should know from the start:
Communicate with front-end developers. Keep up with Bootstrap and Sass to have a more productive experience with the team.
Ensure that there is a sense of consistency throughout all of the pages while incorporating the company's goal and the needs of the customer.
Include all relevant information, such as button states, titles, links, exceptions, and corner cases. The principle of less is more does not apply here.
Don't allow developers to change or adjust styles based on personal preference. Make it certain that they comply with the design documentation.
Keep the team in the loop with the latest on the style guide
What Should a Brand Style Guide Include?
The goal is to create a practical style guide that entrusts brand creators to assemble a variety of on-brand content. While style guides are often thought of as design-only, this is the document that helps people to understand how the brand looks and speaks.
Soul of the Brand: This is basically the high-level explanation of your brand’s core principles, which can influence everything from the way it speaks to customers to the way the website is designed. It contains your:
Purpose: Why does the brand exist?
Vision: What future does it want to help create? What does the future look like?
Mission: What are you here to do? How do you create that future?
Values: What principles guide the behavior?
Verbal Identity: This is everything related to how you talk about the brand, define the products, communicate with users, etc. This includes your:
Brand personality
Voice
Tone
Personality
Communication
Tagline
Value proposition
Messaging pillars/differentiators
Visual Identity
Logo
Colors
Typography
Additional elements (if needed)
Photography
Illustration
Iconography
Data visualization
Designing a Style Guide
Before we get started…
Here are a few tips for when the style guides are designed
Design the product first and then create a style guide. Don’t start by creating a style guide. First, figure out what works and what doesn’t work. Then standardize it.
You’ll never be fully happy with the style guide. That’s okay. Creating a universal design language is an iterative process.
Have a strong understanding of the voice and message that the product conveys before writing the style guide.
Now let's start...
Principles
Styleguides should have a page on design principles. Design principles are a collection of guidelines that influence how designers approach and solve problems when creating a product.
One of the key aspects of a good design principle is that it isn’t obvious or too broad. A good design principle should be specific enough to allow a designer to make decisions.
When coming up with design principles, less is more. Begin with three guiding principles and iterate from there.
Typography
Typography is key to reaching unity across multiple products and designs. Every style guide should have a few sections describing typography specifications.
It’s important to define the number of typefaces and sizes that can be used in order to keep your designs simple. As a general rule, start with at most two fonts — one for your headers, and one for your bodies. Most of the time, there won't be any need for more than that.
Also, include sample use cases of typography to aid other designers and developers to understand when to use something like bold or italics.
Imagery
Show, don’t tell. Imagery is a powerful tool in the hands of a designer. Images are dynamic. They convey meaning at first glance and evoke emotions.
If the assets are available, consider including a section that describes what kinds of images other designers should use to convey the product’s voice and identity
Imagery isn’t only confined to photographs. Companies like Dropbox rarely use photographs in their designs. Instead, they communicate their personality through illustrations.
Grids and spacing
Good design cares about whitespace as much as content. Style guides should reflect this and include a section on grids and spacing.
It’s important to specify a grid method that works for every use case. In the section on grids, include details like the number of columns and rows, margins, and example uses.
Spacing should have its own section. Consistent spacing across a product creates a sense of uniformity and balance.
Having a list of margin sizes is useful to both designers and developers. In particular, developers can codify the space scale into sass variables.
Color
Color is another essential element in style guides. Color helps establish visual hierarchies and creates emotional resonance.
Color sections in style guides make the lives of designers easier. Instead of spending time fretting about which colors to use, designers can reference the style guide. This allows them to focus on layout.
Interface elements
A lot of designers and developers think about UIs as collections of interface elements. The idea is that each UI element is its own entity. For example, a card is a single element.
Using this approach, designers can re-use elements across multiple products and designs. This creates design consistency. It also minimizes the number of times designers spend re-inventing the wheel by designing UI element that already exists within the brand.
UI elements-based thinking also helps engineers. Design elements can translate neatly into code. From an engineering perspective, elements are like lego blocks that you can piece together.
Principles, typography, imagery, grids and spacing, color, and interface elements. This list isn’t complete, but these six types create the foundation of a good style guide.
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