Developing a consistent brand identity hinges on the creation of a robust brand style guide. These essential documents serve as the rulebook for graphic designers, marketers, web developers, community managers, and product teams, ensuring a unified brand presentation to the world.
Think about the brands that resonate most strongly with you. Their memorability often stems from consistent visual elements – the repeated use of the same logo, fonts, colors, and imagery. This brand recognition, built through repetition and consistency, is only achievable when every team member adheres to a well-defined brand style guide.
So, what exactly constitutes a brand style guide? This article will explore the key elements of a style guide and showcase compelling examples in action, providing inspiration for your upcoming branding initiatives or website redesign.
What are Brand Guidelines?
Brand guidelines, often referred to as a brand style guide, are the governing principles for a company’s branding’s composition, design, and overall aesthetic. These guidelines dictate the visual and stylistic elements across various brand touchpoints, from logos and websites to blog content and advertising materials.
Consider the most recognizable brands globally. You likely identify them instantly due to:
- Consistent visual and written messaging.
- Uniform brand colors across all platforms.
- Familiar brand voice and language.
- A cohesive and organized, yet adaptable, brand presence.
Before diving into the specifics of creating your brand guidelines, it’s beneficial to establish your brand’s mission statement and buyer personas. These strategic foundations will provide crucial context for developing the tactical components of your brand style guide.
Brand Guidelines Mission Statement
Your brand guidelines mission statement ensures all content creation aligns with a common objective and resonates with your target audience. It provides direction for blog posts, paid advertising content, visual media, and even your brand slogan.
Brand Guidelines Buyer Persona
Defining your brand guidelines buyer persona helps tailor your blog content, ad copy, and visual media to attract valuable leads and customers to your business.
Key Elements of a Brand Style Guide
A comprehensive brand style guide extends far beyond just a logo. It visually encapsulates your brand’s essence and purpose.
Here are crucial elements that contribute to a successful brand style guide, followed by inspiring Style Guide Examples:
Style Guide Examples: Showcasing Best Practices
- City of Chicago
- Olympic Games
- Amnesty International UK
- Sonic the Hedgehog
- Burger King
- Eurovision Song Contest
- OpenAI
- DC Comics 1982
- Reporters San Frontières
- Major League Soccer
- Czech Railway
- Coronation 2023
- EPA (1977)
- Docusign
- Zagreb Airport
- Oxford Student Union
- Fiat 2019
- Team Canada
- Hulu
- Brasil Governo Federal
- IBM
- American Airlines
- British Rail
- Elizabeth Line, Transport for London
- Medium
- Walmart
- Asana
- Spotify
- Starbucks
- Paris 2024
- Urban Outfitters
- Love to Ride
- Barbican
- I Love New York
- TikTok
- University of the Arts Helsinki
- Western Athletic Conference
- Discord
- Netflix
- NASA
- New York City Transit Authority
1. City of Chicago
Full Brand Guide: City of Chicago brand guide
What stands out: The City of Chicago’s brand guidelines are beautifully grounded in the simplicity and symbolism of its city flag, particularly its colors and design. The guide adopts a fun, approachable tone, even acknowledging the popularity of Chicago star tattoos.
A notable detail is the custom font, Big Shoulders, inspired by Carl Sandburg’s poem “Chicago,” which gave the city its iconic nickname. This connection to local culture adds a layer of depth and meaning to the brand identity.
2. Olympic Games
Full Brand Guide: Olympic Games brand guide
What stands out: While retaining the iconic logo and colors from 1913, the Olympic Games underwent a brand refresh in 2022 led by Ben Hulse. This update embodies the brand’s core values: hope, universality, inclusivity, vibrancy, and progressiveness through a bold color palette and modern design approach.
3. Amnesty International UK
Full Brand Guide: Amnesty International UK brand guide
What stands out: Amnesty International UK’s brand guide clearly articulates its brand personality: bright, bold, and positive. The chosen brand colors—pink, yellow, and blue—reflect cheerfulness, optimism, and boldness. This guide excels in clearly illustrating dos, don’ts, and exceptions, making it exceptionally practical.
4. Sonic the Hedgehog
Full Brand Guide: Sonic the Hedgehog brand guide
What stands out: Even animated characters benefit from style guides. Sonic the Hedgehog’s guide includes defining phrases for each character, a unique and engaging method to ensure consistent brand representation and personality across different media.
5. Burger King
Full Brand Guide: Burger King brand guide
What stands out: Burger King’s brand philosophy centers around making their food “even more craveable.” This extends to font design, custom-created to mirror food shapes, demonstrating how deeply brand identity can be integrated into visual elements.
6. Eurovision Song Contest
Full Brand Guide: Eurovision Song Contest brand guide
What stands out: The Eurovision Song Contest boasts a uniquely customized font so exclusive that it only contains the characters needed to spell “Eurovision.” This extreme customization creates unparalleled brand distinctiveness and visual recognition.
7. OpenAI
Full Brand Guide: OpenAI brand guide
What stands out: OpenAI’s brand guide thoughtfully considers the symbolism behind color choices. Their extensive use of black and white signifies OpenAI as “an empty vessel that adapts to its content,” highlighting the brand’s adaptable and foundational nature.
8. DC Comics 1982
Full Brand Guide Excerpts: DC Comics 1982 brand guide
What stands out: The DC Comics 1982 style guide is a masterclass in storytelling within brand guidelines. Superheroes are categorized by color palettes, and each character entry includes written introductions detailing catchphrases, mythology, and brand-defining elements, enhancing brand depth and lore.
9. Reporters San Frontières
Full Brand Guide: Reporters San Frontières brand guide
What stands out: RSF’s powerful slogan, “Fight for facts,” is mirrored in its simple yet impactful three-color palette: black, white, and vibrant pinkish-red. The guide specifies color usage ratios, ensuring that accent colors (red or black) constitute only 20% of designs, reinforcing the brand’s lean but strong visual identity.
10. Major League Soccer
Full Brand Guide: Major League Soccer brand guide
What stands out: Major League Soccer’s style guide addresses the challenge of accommodating 20 team color combinations. It maintains brand cohesiveness through a single, unvarying logo mark (the crest) and provides specific guidelines for applying color layers to images, ensuring visual unity across diverse team branding.
11. Czech Railway
Full Brand Guide: Czech Railway brand guide
What stands out: The Czech Railway’s brand identity is built around a visually appealing color palette centered on dark blue and deep orange. The logo mark cleverly evokes railway tracks, directly linking the visual identity to the brand’s core service.
12. Coronation 2023
Full Brand Guide: Coronation 2023 brand guide
What stands out: This 23-page guide focuses solely on the emblem for King Charles’ 2023 coronation, exemplifying meticulous detail. It includes numerous examples of emblem usage on merchandise and precise do’s and don’ts, making it a fascinating study in focused brand application.
13. EPA (1977)
Full Brand Guide Excerpts: EPA brand guide
What stands out: The 1977 EPA brand guide is celebrated among graphic designers for its innovative approach. The program identifiers, such as patterns for “toxic substances,” “noise,” and “radiation,” are particularly noteworthy for their creative visual encoding. The jewel-toned rainbow palette, including memorable colors like “Pesticides Green” and “Solid Waste Brown,” adds a unique historical and cultural context.
14. Docusign
Full Brand Guide: Docusign brand guide
What stands out: Docusign’s guide uses colored pie charts to illustrate precise color ratios for brand applications, ensuring consistent visual balance. The striking coral accent color provides a vibrant contrast to the purple-dominated palette, making the brand visually dynamic and memorable.
15. Zagreb Airport
Full Brand Guide: Zagreb Airport brand guide
What stands out: Zagreb Airport creatively utilizes a simple triangle as a fundamental design element, constructing complex iconography that reflects Croatian culture and heritage. This approach demonstrates how simple shapes can be powerful building blocks for a meaningful brand identity.
16. Oxford Student Union
Full Brand Guide: Oxford Student Union brand guide
What stands out: The Oxford Student Union’s style guide thoughtfully includes specific color combinations, a practical addition for ensuring visual harmony. Providing these pre-approved combinations helps maintain brand consistency and is particularly useful for those less confident in color application.
17. Fiat 2019
Full Brand Guide: Fiat 2019 brand guide
What stands out: Fiat’s logo, featuring four diagonal lines, is creatively extended throughout its branding. The style guide showcases playful and imaginative applications of these lines, such as varying line lengths, demonstrating versatility within a minimalist design.
18. Team Canada
Full Brand Guide Excerpts: Team Canada brand guide
What stands out: Even with limited excerpts, Team Canada’s brand guide stands out for its visual appeal. It reimagines the Canadian maple leaf, a potentially overused symbol, with intricate geometric patterns and vibrant colors, revitalizing a national icon for a modern brand identity.
19. Hulu
Full Brand Guide: Hulu brand guide
What stands out: Hulu maximizes impact with a relatively limited color palette, enhanced by bold typography and whimsical illustrations. Their distinctive shade of green, despite being common, sets Hulu apart and contributes to strong brand recognition.
20. Brasil Governo Federal
Full Brand Guide: Brasil Governo Federal brand guide
What stands out: Brasil Governo Federal’s brand guide is defined by bold style and striking colors, immediately capturing attention. It uniquely includes guidelines for logo usage in video format, addressing a common brand question often overlooked in style guides.
21. IBM
Full Brand Guide: IBM brand guide
What stands out: IBM’s brand guide is an interactive and comprehensive experience, featuring videos and typeface previews. It supports non-Latin scripts like Arabic and includes fonts with alternate glyphs and ligatures. A dedicated section on data visualization further emphasizes its thoroughness and attention to detail.
22. American Airlines
Full Brand Guide: American Airlines brand guide
What stands out: American Airlines’ style guide is rich with examples, providing specific details like which parts of an airplane are permissible in photos. This level of detail is invaluable for large brands running diverse ad campaigns, minimizing inconsistencies and human error.
23. British Rail
Full Brand Guide: British Rail corporate identity manual
What stands out: British Rail’s corporate identity manual is a historical document, compiling decades of brand evolution. It’s a valuable resource for observing subtle brand changes over time and understanding long-term brand management.
24. Elizabeth Line, Transport for London
Full Brand Guide: Elizabeth Line brand guide
What stands out: Transport for London’s Elizabeth Line brand guide includes a section on “design idiom flexibility.” This offers guidance on adjusting Elizabeth line branding based on context, ranging from “localness” to “Elizabeth line-ness,” providing practical adaptability guidelines.
25. Medium
Full Brand Guide: Medium brand guide
What stands out: Medium’s simple brand style guide emphasizes logo, wordmark, and symbol usage. The logo is designed to be “confident, premium, timeless, and modern,” reflecting the platform’s values and aesthetic.
26. Walmart
Full Brand Guide: Walmart brand guide
What stands out: Walmart’s comprehensive guide covers logo, photography, typography, illustrations, iconography, voice, and editorial style. Their color palette is so integral to their brand that their primary color is named “Walmart Blue,” highlighting color’s central role in brand identity. Inclusion of ADA compliance for color palette is also notable for accessibility considerations.
27. Asana
Full Brand Guide: Asana brand guide
What stands out: Asana’s straightforward style guide focuses on logo and color palette, clearly demonstrating correct asset usage. Simplicity and clarity are key to this brand’s guidelines, making it easy for users to understand and implement.
28. Spotify
Full Brand Guide: Spotify brand guide
What stands out: Spotify’s color palette is concise, with just three color codes. The guide focuses on logo variations and album artwork guidelines. Offering downloadable icon versions of the logo simplifies brand representation across platforms.
29. Starbucks
Full Brand Guide: Starbucks brand guide
What stands out: Starbucks’ interactive brand style guide details the use of core elements like the Siren logo and green color palette. It visually demonstrates creative asset application across different channels, offering practical visual guidance.
30. Paris 2024
Full Brand Guide: Paris 2024 brand guide
What stands out: Paris 2024’s brand identity pays tribute to the 1924 Olympic Games with Art Deco-inspired design. Eco-branding principles were applied to minimize ink, paper, power, and data consumption, demonstrating sustainable design considerations.
The guide reinvents 62 Olympic and Paralympic pictograms as “coats of arms,” each designed with symmetry, creating visually engaging and symbolic representations of sports.
31. Urban Outfitters
Full Brand Guide: Urban Outfitters brand guide
What stands out: Urban Outfitters’ brand guidelines incorporate photography, color, and tone of voice, reflecting a California-inspired aesthetic. It also defines its ideal consumer and brand beliefs, providing a holistic brand identity framework.
32. Love to Ride
Full Brand Guide: Love to Ride brand guide
What stands out: Love to Ride, a cycling company, embraces color variety in its visually appealing style guide. With nine color codes and detailed guidelines for secondary logos and imagery, it emphasizes visual richness and brand dynamism.
33. Barbican
Full Brand Guide: Barbican brand guide
What stands out: Barbican’s style guide, for an art and learning center, is bold yet simple, heavily focusing on logo and supporting typefaces. It prioritizes clarity and impactful visual elements.
34. I Love New York
Full Brand Guide: I Love New York brand guide
What stands out: Despite its famously simple “I Love New York” T-shirts, the brand has a comprehensive style guide. It begins with a thorough explanation of mission, vision, story, target audience, and tone of voice before detailing logo positioning on merchandise, highlighting the importance of brand narrative.
35. TikTok
Full Brand Guide: TikTok brand guide
What stands out: TikTok’s style guide functions as an interactive brand book, offering an in-depth exploration of brand expression through design. It covers logo, co-branding, color, and typography in an engaging, digital format.
36. University of the Arts Helsinki
Full Brand Guide: University of the Arts Helsinki brand guide
What stands out: The University of the Arts Helsinki’s style guide is more of a creative branding album, showcasing the logo in diverse contexts, including animations. It emphasizes visual exploration and brand experience over traditional guideline formats.
37. Western Athletic Conference
Full Brand Guide: Western Athletic Conference brand guide
What stands out: The Western Athletic Conference’s brand style guide provides extensive background on its history, mission, and vision. It also highlights member universities and athletic events, contextualizing the brand within its organizational ecosystem.
38. Discord
Full Brand Guide: Discord brand guide
What stands out: Discord’s brand guide is as vibrant and playful as its user communities. Motion elements are based on a dot, symbolizing user interaction within Discord communities, adding a dynamic and user-centric dimension to the brand.
39. Netflix
Full Brand Guide: Netflix brand guide
What stands out: Netflix’s public brand assets primarily focus on logo treatment. The guide offers simple rules for size, spacing, and placement of its capitalized typeface, prioritizing logo consistency and recognition.
40. NASA
Full Brand Guide: NASA brand guide
What stands out: NASA’s “Graphics Standards Manual” is comprehensive and official, spanning 220 pages. It details logo placements, color applications, supporting designs, and even branding rules for space shuttles, reflecting the meticulous nature of the organization.
41. New York City Transit Authority
Full Brand Guide: New York City Transit Authority brand guide
What stands out: Similar to NASA, the NYCTA Graphics Standards Manual includes detailed typography rules for numbers, arrows, and public transit symbols. It offers a fascinating look into the design system that shapes everyday urban navigation.
Branding Guidelines Tips
To elevate your brand style guide, consider leveraging tools like HubSpot’s Brand Kit Generator. Additionally, these best practices, used by HubSpot’s Creative team, can enhance your brand guidelines:
1. Make your guidelines a branded document.
Ensure your brand guidelines themselves are a branded experience, whether online or in a presentation. Mirror your brand voice, imagery, colors, and typography within the guide itself.
Insights from HubSpot’s Creative Team
HubSpot’s visual identity refresh was accompanied by a branded playbook, distributed internally. This playbook summarized changes and provided guidance, effectively showcasing the brand refresh within a branded context. Even using free tools like Google Slides, this branded approach is achievable for any brand size.
2. Name your brand’s colors.
Go beyond generic color names by assigning unique names to your brand colors. This ties tactical branding elements to a broader brand theme or ethos.
Insights from HubSpot’s Creative Team
HubSpot’s color palette refresh involved brightening hues and renaming them based on global cultural and geographical touchstones, adding layers of meaning and brand storytelling to color choices. Consider your brand’s unique qualities when naming colors – a car accident law firm might name red “Stop Light,” connecting color to brand context.
3. Create easy-to-use branded templates.
Supplement your guidelines with branded templates, empowering your team to create on-brand assets consistently, regardless of design expertise.
Insights from HubSpot’s Creative Team
HubSpot utilizes Canva for template management, enabling team members to easily customize branded designs for various needs. These templates streamline content creation and ensure brand consistency across all outputs, even for non-designers.
4. Ensure your branding is optimized for all channels.
Your brand guidelines should specify adaptations for different marketing channels, considering sizing and accessibility. Designs should be adaptable across platforms while maintaining core brand identity.
Branding should be versatile enough to work effectively across Instagram, websites, and other channels without significant alterations, ensuring a unified brand experience everywhere.
Build a Memorable Style Guide of Your Own
A well-crafted brand style guide fosters customer recognition and reinforces desired brand associations through consistent visual cues. Drawing inspiration from these style guide examples, you can create a timeless and effective guide for your own brand.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in January 2017 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.
