What is a style guide?
A style guide is the complete record of how to use a brand: logo, colour, typography, voice and imagery. It keeps that brand consistent across teams, platforms and channels. It records not only what the elements are but when and why to use them, so the brand stays recognisable whoever does the work.
What goes into a style guide?
The elements, and the judgement around them. The elements are created during the brand identity work, and the guide is the step that records them. A complete guide covers the logo and how to use it, including clear space, minimum sizes, and the treatments it must never be given. It defines the colour palette with the role each colour plays. It sets out the typography too, from the typefaces to the hierarchy that keeps layouts consistent. Imagery and illustration style follow, then the brand's voice: how it sounds, what it says, and what it would never say.
The element lists are the easy half. What makes a guide useful is the when and the why: worked examples, dos and don'ts in pairs, and the reasoning behind each rule. A rule with a reason survives contact with a deadline. We write for the person using the guide at speed, the freelancer on day one and the marketer building a campaign page. We do not write for the designers who already know.
A style guide works when…
- New suppliers produce on-brand work from the guide alone, without a briefing call
- The design team stops getting asked the same questions over and over
- Campaigns from different teams sit side by side and read as one brand
- Feedback cites the guide by page and rule, not from memory
- People link to it unprompted, because it is easier than guessing
Style guide, brand guidelines or design system: which do you need?
Start from who is confused. If marketing, agencies and partners each produce work that looks almost-but-not-quite yours, you need a style guide. It writes down the rules the brand already follows. The problem sits deeper when the identity itself says the wrong thing, or has never said much at all. No guide can fix that, and the work is a brand identity project, of which guidelines are the closing chapter.
If the inconsistency lives inside the product (screens, components, flows), you need a design system: the built-and-coded machinery a document alone cannot supply. Many organisations eventually hold all three, and they nest. The identity says who you are, the style guide says how to show it, and the design system builds it into the product. We work out which layer is missing before writing a page of any of them.
Guidance people use
- Lives at an address everyone knows and search can find
- Answers real questions: which logo on a dark photo? Which tone for an apology?
- Covers the awkward cases too, from co-branding to tiny sizes to someone else's template
- Has an owner, a changelog and a way to ask for a ruling
- Short enough to read, structured enough to skim
A PDF nobody opens
- Emailed once, saved nowhere anyone remembers
- Fifty pages of philosophy before the first usable rule
- Shows perfect examples but not the awkward cases people actually hit
- Frozen at launch while the brand moves on without it
- Answers only the questions its authors found interesting
Where we stand on Style Guides
- 01A style guide documents what the elements are, and when and why to use them.
- 02Write for the least-briefed person using the brand at speed. The experts do not need it.
- 03Dos and don'ts in pairs, each with its reason, outlast any list of rules alone.
- 04A digital guide that can change beats a launch PDF, because brands keep moving after launch day.
- 05Ownership is part of the deliverable: an unmaintained guide quietly becomes fiction.
Work featuring Style Guides
Media North
Mobile Ad Specialist Website
Brand identity and a website for a mobile ad specialist.
Web DesignBrand IdentityStyle GuideContent DesignBrand Audit
RT7 Digital
Amazon Specialist Website
Branding and a website for the agency that runs everything around a brand's Amazon listings.
Web DesignBrand IdentityStyle GuideDesktop ResearchBrand Audit
What’s included in Style Guides?
- Brand usage guidelines
- Logo, colour, typography, spacing and imagery, with clear space, minimum sizes and the common misuses forbidden in advance.
- Co-branding & partner guidelines
- How the mark behaves beside somebody else's, and what a partner is and is not allowed to do with it.
- Editorial style rules
- Spelling, capitalisation, numbers, dates and the organisation's own vocabulary, settled so two writers agree.
- Digital style guides
- A guide that lives as a site: linkable, searchable, versioned.
- Asset library
- One place the current logos, fonts, templates and imagery live, with the retired versions taken down.
- Rollout & training
- Walkthroughs for the teams who will live with the guide, and a feedback route into the next revision.
Final questions
What is the difference between a style guide and brand guidelines?
In practice the terms overlap, and many organisations use them interchangeably. Where people do draw a distinction, brand guidelines cover the identity's core usage of logo, colour and typography. A style guide reaches further into application: voice, editorial conventions, imagery and channel-specific rules. What matters is coverage and clarity, not the title on the cover.How long does a style guide take?
About a week to build the guide itself. A guide documents decisions rather than making them, so the timeline depends on whether the decisions exist. Logo rules, palette, type scale, imagery and voice come out of a brand identity exercise, and the guide is the documentation step at the end of it. Where that work is done and the material is in hand, a week is realistic. Where it is not, the identity project comes first and the guide is its closing phase.What format should a style guide be in?
Living and digital. A guide people can link to, search and update beats a static PDF. The PDF is out of date the first time the brand moves, and invisible once the email that carried it is buried. Exports still have their place (printers and procurement often want a document), but the canonical version should be the one that can change.Who maintains the style guide?
Someone named: a role, not a committee. We deliver every guide with an owner agreed, a simple update path, and the expectation that it will change. Each new campaign, channel or sub-brand generates rulings, and recording them keeps the guide worth consulting. Left unmaintained, a guide stops describing the brand within a year or two.