I’m so thrilled to be sharing with you today everything you need to know about creating consistent and professional graphics. If you’re not design-savvy or have no idea where to start when choosing your colors, fonts and other elements for your brand then I will show you how by creating a Brand Style Guide.
Having a Brand Style Guide is such a valuable tool for your business. It will help you stay consistent across your website, social media and visual content. Plus it will save you loads of time and effort so you don’t get stuck picking and searching for fonts and colors every time you want to create a new graphic.
In this post, I will show you step by step on how to create your own Brand Style Guide. By the end you’ll have all your design elements picked out, so you can easily create your own professional graphics that will ultimately help you stand out and drive more sales into your business.
WHY HAVING A BRAND STYLE GUIDE IS SO IMPORTANT
When it comes to branding, consistency is the key!
So what does this actually mean? Consistency is about showing up in the same predictable way. It’s not about being boring and always doing the same thing, but rather about creating the same consistent feel, style and look with your graphics and visuals.
Let’s look at a few reasons why you should stay consistent with your branding:
Your audience is more likely to consume your content or make a purchase from you if you look familiar every single time you show up. It takes around 7 times for the average person to see something before they take action.
Being consistent makes your brand look professional. It looks like you have gone to the effort of creating a brand with a purpose, rather than just throwing something together. If you keep your graphics consistent, your audience will recognise your brand even when you do something new.
Being consistent will save you a lot of time and makes things so much easier. You don’t want to be picking out new fonts or new colors every time you create a new graphic for your website or social media post. This is super time consuming and makes things really hard, diluting your brand’s impact.
So how do you stay consistent? It’s super easy with a Brand Style Guide. A Brand Style Guide basically showcases all your colors, fonts, patterns and graphics elements including your logo, that represent your brand’s unique personality.
Having a Brand Style Guide is super important when it comes to creating consistent branding. It will help you to stay uniform across your website, blog, social media and any other visual content you create.
HOW TO CREATE YOUR OWN BRAND STYLE GUIDE
Now I am going to show you how to quickly and easily put together your own Brand Style Guide. This one-page brand style guide will showcase your logo, colors, fonts, patterns and brand imagery. By the end you’ll have all your design elements picked out, so you can easily create your own professional graphics.
Canva is the program you will be using to create your Brand Style Guide.
Free Branding Templates
Strengthen your branding with your own Brand Style Guide, Color Palette and Mood Board templates.
Easily edit in Canva.
Get Instant Access Below.
OPEN YOUR FILE: Click on the link that gives you access to your Brand Style Guide template (this will be emailed to you after you enter your details above).
LOGO: Click on uploads and upload your logo and submark. Place it under logo, along
with your submark. Your submark is made of elements from your original logo and is
typically smaller in size. Don’t worry if you don’t have one right now, you can simply leave
it out.
COLOR PALETTE: Add in your brand colors with the correct hex code, this comes in handy when using your colors on your website or any other platform. If you don’t have the hex code and you can upload your color using Canva’s Color Palette Generator and it will match it for you with a hex code. If you have not yet picked out your brand colors you
can refer to this blog post: The Fastest And Easiest Way To Pick Your Brand Colors this will help you pick the perfect color palette to suit your brand.
FAVICON: Add in your favicon. A favicon is the image you see in the tab section on your
PATTERNS, TEXTURES & ELEMENTS: Add your patterns, textures and elements . You can search for these under elements and photos or you can upload your own. There are a lot
of great websites you can buy patterns and elements from, including Creative Market
and Etsy.
FONTS: Add your fonts. You will want to pick 2-3 fonts, a header font, body font and
accent font. My advice with fonts is, don’t pick anything that is too hard to read or messy.
And if you are using a script font make this your accent font, as sometimes script fonts
simply don’t work in a design. You may choose to not have an accent font.
You can also search for fonts in Canva, if you love handwritten or script style fonts, type in script or calligraphy and it will show you all the different fonts you can choose from. You can search for free fonts in google or buy fonts from Creative Market and then
upload these to your Canva account. You do need the pro version of Canva to be able to
upload your own fonts.
BRAND WORDS: Next place in your brand words. Ideally, you will want to use around 4-5
words that best represent your brand. Think about how you want your audience to feel when they come across your website or social media accounts. What emotions do you want to evoke? If your brand was a person how would you describe them? Try not to pick words that convey the same thing. Here is an example: Elegant, Feminine, Stylish, Simple and Trendy.
IMAGES: Upload your brand images. These are the images you will use across your branding
and should be a combination of stock photos and your own photos. There are a lot of great
websites that you can get free or paid images from. View our Stock Photo Guide where we share our favorite sources for downloading high-quality stock photos.
SAVE YOUR FILE: Once you are ready to save your file click Download in the menu bar.
Click download, select the file (PDF or png is recommended), scroll down and select the
exact page you want to save, then click done.
Don’t worry, if you don’t have everything to begin with. You may not have a submark, and that is okay you can add this in once its been created. Or you may choose to not have an accent font. Now you have created your very own Brand Style Guide, print it out and stick it up. Make sure you stick with it and use it across your website, social media and visual content. Don’t start changing things up and stay consistent!
I really hope this helps you and gives you the confidence to create your own beautiful graphics that you can be proud of. Having a Brand Style Guide has been such a valuable tool for me, not only has it helped me to stay consistent and look professional it has also saved me loads of time.
FREE BRANDING TEMPLATES
Strengthen your branding with your own Brand Style Guide, Color Palette and Mood Board Templates. Easily edit in Canva. Get Instant Access Below.
