Tom Welbourne
Helping Small and Medium Businesses Achieve Their Full Marketing Potential | Digital Marketing Expert
How To Design Your Company Brand Guidelines
- August 22, 2019
- , 2:13 pm
72% of marketers believe that branded content is more effective than advertising in a magazine according to business2community.com.
It can be quite off-putting when you go on a website and the branding of the business doesn’t match up with the social profiles.
You start to wonder if the company is legit, authentic and even worth doing business with right?
It’s important you create a set of brand guidelines and make sure everyone is sticking to them when creating content or designing for your business.
Just one bad apple can spoil the bunch!
In this article, we’re going to talk about the best practices for designing your company’s brand guidelines.
LOGO
We haven’t come across any business that is successful which doesn’t have a logo so we thought we’d start off with your logo.
Your logo will largely determine what colour scheme you use for your website, material and photos so think carefully through this beforehand.
Each colour resembles a certain mood, personality and some might say…character!
(Image courtesy of – iamladyfab.com)
Once you’ve selected your colour of the logo, you can move on to the logo itself.
What do you want your logo to resemble?
How do you want your business to be perceived?
Because when you break branding down to its core, it’s all about perceptions and how you want your business to be perceived by the world.
We’ve seen businesses who haven’t even made a sale who by looks of their website and sales material, you’d think they were the biggest company in their field.
TYPOGRAPHY
Ask any copywriter worth their salt and they’ll tell you the importance of the type used has on how much is sold.
There are some appalling fonts available and we’ve seen them used by some well-known companies.
It’s shocking!
Sans serif or serif font?
The research shows that serif fonts are easier on the eye in printed works than sans-serif and if you want to learn more about why then you should check this article out by scribe.com.au.
We’re not 100% on this because we’ve seen serif fonts work perfectly for some businesses and we’ll sit on the fence for this one and let you fight it out.
Word of caution: use a font that is well-known as you may need someone from outside the company to use the same font as your using for the business. If you use a customised font then you run the risk of problems arising down the line.
DESIGN LAYOUT FOR YOUR WEBSITE
This point is the most important in this whole article.
You should spend the majority of your branding time on what you want the website to look like because it plays a big part in user experience.
75% of people base a brands credibility from their website.
There’s probably around 3 seconds where you’ve got to make your website appealing in order for people to stay on your site.
Spend the extra money and time in getting this part right.
For example, have a look at backlinko.com – a website for digital marketers run by Brian Dean here:
It’s clean, spaced out and the colours make one another stand out.
The use of illustrations also helps the page stand out too!
This kind of design may set you back a couple of thousand pounds but if you can hire a designer who is in-house then you get the benefit of being able to customise all your designs to a tee.
