21 Brand Style Guide Examples I Love (for Visual Inspiration)

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Developing a consistent brand starts with creating a brand style guide. These branding rule books help graphic designers, marketers, web developers, community managers, and even product packaging departments present a unified vision of the brand to the public.

The best brands stick in our brains because their presence is defined by the repetition of the same logo, fonts, colors, and images. Once we see them enough, they become instantly recognizable. All of this is possible when each member of your team adheres to a cohesive brand style guide.

So, what is a brand style guide? In this article, I’ll go over the elements of a style guide and share some amazing examples of them in action to help inspire your next branding project or website redesign.

Table of Contents

What are brand guidelines?
The Elements of a Brand Style Guide
Brand Style Guide Examples
Branding Guidelines Tips

Picture the most recognizable brands you can think of.

Chances are, you’ve learned to recognize them due to one of the following reasons:

There’s a written or visual consistency across the messaging.
The same brand colors are reflected across every asset.
The language sounds familiar.
It‘s all very organized and, while not rigid, it’s cohesive.

But before you sit down to create your branding guidelines, I’d recommend taking a step back and define your brand’s mission statement and buyer personas.

These strategic elements will help you dive into the tactical components of your brand style guide later.

Brand Guidelines Mission Statement

To me, your mission statement is the compass of your brand style guide. It‘s an action-oriented statement declaring your organization’s purpose.

This statement ensures that all your content is working toward the same goal and connecting with your audience. It can also guide your blog and paid content, ad copy, visual media, and slogan.

Pro tip: You can either include your mission statement within your style guide, create a separate document for reference, or distill your mission statement into a slogan that you can place at the head of your document.

Brand Guidelines Buyer Persona

A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. It includes details on your customer’s job title, age, gender, and professional challenges — therefore stipulating for whom your brand publishes content.

Your buyer persona guides your blog content, ad copy, and visual media, which can attract valuable leads and customers to your business.

Pro tip: Download our free resource below on how to create your own style guide with brand guidelines templates to follow. Creating a consistent style guide isn’t easy, but with these tools you can build an unforgettable one with ease.

The Elements of a Brand Style Guide

A brand style guide encompasses much more than just a logo (although that’s important, too). It visually encompasses everything your brand is about — down to your business’ purpose.

Here are some key elements that I believe make or break a brand style guide.

Logo

Your logo might seem like the simplest aspect of your branding guidelines, but in reality, I‘d argue it’s one of the most complex and most important parts.

In your guide, you should:

Include a visual of your logo.
Explain the design details of your logo.
Describe how your logo can be used by external and internal publishers.

You should also include wrong usages — i.e, you might advise against rotating the design or curving the font. That way, whether you or someone else is publishing information about your company, your logo looks consistent everywhere.

Pro tip: If your brand is well-known and many outlets publish information about you, you also might want to provide an entire document outlining acceptable use policies for your logo.

Color Palette

In my opinion, the color palette is probably one of the most distinctive and recognizable parts of a company’s branding guidelines.

It’s the group of colors your company uses to design its brand assets, guiding every piece of visual content created.

These color combinations often follow HEX or RGB color codes, and govern your logo, web design, printed ads, and event collateral.

Pro tip: A brand color palette should not only include your primary color, but also a wide variety of secondary, tertiary, and neutral colors. This will allow you to come up with more dynamic and varied designs in the content creation stage.

If you don’t define an array of options, you can run the risk of having your team create content with random secondary colors, which can look inconsistent.

Typography

Typography is a visual element of your brand style guide that goes beyond the font you use in your company logo. It supports your brand’s design down to the links and copy on your website — even your tagline.

I recommend specifying a primary and secondary font, with a mixture of serifs and font weights for different use cases.

Remember, the goal of your branding guidelines is to empower your people and external stakeholders to create consistent but varied collateral on behalf of your brand. You don’t want to limit them with a single font option.

For instance, HubSpot’s primary font is Lexend Deca (sans-serif), while our secondary font is Queens (serif). They’re both integrated in our very own Content Hub, and our design tool, Canva, where we can use them to create assets.

Pro tip: Don’t forget that typography also plays a major role in your website’s user experience. You want to make sure it is visually appealing while also being accessible and easy to read.

Imagery and Iconography

You may be able to only include your logo, colors, and fonts in your guidelines.

However, if you’d like to create a stronger style guide, consider including approved imagery, pre-designed icons, and custom symbols for your company to use across your website and print collateral.

If your budget is smaller, you can recommend photographic styles (i.e candid versus staged, etcetera), and then direct content creators to your preferred stock photo provider (i.e. Shutterstock, Unsplash).

Alternatively, you can commission a company photoshoot at a studio and make the resulting photography available for creative use.

Pro tip: Symbols and icons can also be a great addition to your branding guidelines. As with photos, you can always find free icons online and recommend what to use versus what not to use (e.g., outlines only vs. full color).

You can also commission custom icons from a freelance graphic designer.

Brand Voice

If your company visuals are the flesh and bones of your style guide, I’m going to say your brand voice is the beating heart.

The importance of your brand voice can’t be overstated.

Maybe you want your company’s personality to be friendly and casual, or you may prefer a more distant and formal voice.

Either way, you want to make it easy for marketers, salespeople, and content creators on your team to know how to represent your brand online. This will ensure consistent messaging across all channels.

You can also include a full editorial style guide. The job of an editorial style guide is to commit an editorial stylebook on how to phrase certain products, list topics the brand can and cannot write about, and other companies it can mention.

Your editorial style guide can guide your blog content, video scripts, website and landing page copy, PR talking points, and knowledge base articles.

As you can see, the purpose of the brand style guide is to form and maintain all of the various elements of a company that, when combined, spell out the entire brand as it’s recognized.

Ready to get started? HubSpot’s Brand Kit Generator can help you create all of these key branding and style guide elements with ease (and for free).