The Benefit of Having a Style Guide
It's not only big brands who have a visual identity, you can have one too
This week, I have been going down the AI rabbit hole, having a lot of fun and having my mind blown using one of the more popular web development tools called Lovable.dev.
If you haven’t yet explored the power of AI for web development and, like me, enjoy solving problems where existing solutions fall short, you’ll find that AI enables you to quickly create prototypes that effectively visualise your ideas, making it easier for others to understand your vision.
However, there’s one caveat - AI can only do what you tell it, at least for now. So if you don’t have a ‘style guide’ which depicts how your logo, colour scheme, typography should be used, it will create what it thinks you want, rather than what is aligned to your ‘brand’.
You don’t need to be Coca Cola or any other big brand to have a style guide - once you have a business for which you have knowledge of your target audience, then you can create one.
You can start from something as simple as this one-sheet, which we use for Startup School for Seniors, which is a simple colour palette and typography uses.
To something more sophisticated, such as this one for Advantages of Age:
The benefits to having a style guide - no matter how simple or sophisticated - are numerous. First off, it’s a way of signalling to your audience what your brand is about - and of making them familiar with it.
Seeing the same imagery repeated across your social media channels, in any of the marketing material you produce, on your website, over time, creates a familiarity with your target customer. It makes you easier to spot in a crowded marketplace - whether that’s while scrolling through Instagram or wandering around a local market.
When it comes to using AI, having a style guide helps software such as Lovable to produce a website, for example, that aligns with your other communication channels. Here’s a glimpse of what I’ve been working on for Advantages of Age for example:
You can see how the colour scheme in the style guide, the fonts and the logo are picked up in the website to create a consistency with our social channels.
If you have a logo and a colour scheme and typography (fonts) you regularly use, you can start to do this yourself using a tool such as Canva, for example. ChatGPT may also be able to help by suggesting a suitable colour palette and fonts based on your business idea, from which you can use Canva to refine the actual colours and fonts to add to your style sheet.
I have, in the past, used designers to assist me with creating a style guide, and the benefit of working with a professional - if you have the budget to do so - is that they will work with you to help you to understand your target audience, what you have in mind, how your logo will be used, for example so that the style guide reflects the multiple ways in which it will be used.
Advantages of Age, for example, has both a logo spelling out the words and a badge.
While having a style guide is not always essential in the early days of the business, for those who are more established and considering how to embed your business in the mind of your customer, I would suggest it’s an essential tool. Not only does it help any designer you work with in the future to immediately ‘get’ how to visually represent what you are asking for, it also helps your customer to feel they know you and what your business is about.
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