A Consistent Look Without a Style Guide

Why the long version fails

Proper brand guidelines are written for organisations with a marketing department and many suppliers producing material simultaneously.

They explain rationale, show incorrect usage, define tone of voice, and specify things a small business will never need.

Nobody at a small business reads forty pages before making a poster, so the document sits in a folder and the material stays inconsistent.

The version that works is a single page answering the questions somebody actually has when producing something, which is a shorter list than it seems.

The seven answers

• Where the logo files are, and which to use.
• The colour codes, for screen and for print.
• The typeface, and a fallback.
• How the name is written, exactly.
• What to do when the logo sits on a photograph.
• The minimum size the logo may be used at.
• Two examples of correct material.

Those cover almost every question a printer, signwriter, employee, or new supplier will ask, and a page containing them answers faster than a document containing everything.

The name is the item people get wrong

Worth its own line, since it produces more inconsistency than colour ever does.

Specify capitalisation, whether Limited or Ltd is used, whether an ampersand or the word and, and whether a location forms part of the name.

Businesses regularly appear in four variants across their own material because nobody ever wrote down which one is correct.

Include how it should be said as well as written, if there is any doubt, since staff answering the phone are producing a version of the brand too.

That single line prevents more visible inconsistency than the colour codes do.

Two examples beat any amount of explanation

The part that makes a one-page guide work for people who are not designers.

Include a picture of a correctly produced item: a business card, an invoice header, a social post.

Somebody producing something new copies the example rather than interpreting a rule, which is faster and produces better results.

One example of something done badly is also worth including, if a specific mistake keeps recurring, such as the logo stretched or recoloured.

Keep it to two or three images, since the value is in being scannable rather than comprehensive.

A worked example

A business had guidelines produced with their rebrand, running to about thirty pages.

Two years later their material was inconsistent: three shades of the brand colour in circulation, the logo stretched on one document, and the business name written two ways.

Nobody had opened the document, including the owner.

They extracted a single page: logo files and location, two colour codes with print references, the typeface, the exact name, minimum size, and photographs of a correct card and invoice.

They sent it to the printer, the signwriter, and every member of staff.

The inconsistency stopped, not because the information was new but because it was now in a form somebody would read before producing something.

Where it has to live

The practical half, and the reason most guides fail even when short.

Put it in shared business storage, in the same folder as the logo files, so that finding one finds the other.

Send it unprompted to anybody producing anything, rather than waiting to be asked, since suppliers work from whatever they were given.

Include it when a new member of staff starts, alongside everything else they receive.

And name the file so it is obvious, since a document called guidelines-final-v3 in a folder of forty items is effectively missing.

Keep it current in one place

Since a stale specification is worse than none, being confidently wrong.

Update it when anything changes, immediately, as part of making the change rather than afterwards.

Date it, so anybody holding an old copy can tell.

Where more than one version is circulating among suppliers, send the current one round again, which takes five minutes and resolves the ambiguity.

Review it once a year alongside whatever other annual checks you do, which for most businesses means confirming nothing has changed.

What to leave out

Because the temptation is to grow it back toward the long version.

Rationale, mood boards, and anything explaining why the colours were chosen.

Tone of voice guidance, unless somebody is writing on your behalf, in which case a separate few lines is better than a section.

Exhaustive incorrect-usage examples, which take space and are read by nobody.

Every possible variant and application, which can be decided when it arises.

If the page will not print on one side, something on it is not being used.

Add a rule only when something goes wrong

The growth principle, which keeps the page useful over years.

Resist adding rules for situations that have not arisen, since that is how a one-page guide becomes a thirty-page one nobody reads.

When a supplier produces something wrong, work out whether the page failed to answer their question, and add a line only if it did.

Frequently the page did answer it and the supplier never received the page, which is a distribution problem rather than a content one.

A guide that grows by one line a year, in response to actual mistakes, stays short and covers exactly the things that go wrong in your business.

The counter-case

Some businesses do need the long version.

Anybody with franchisees, many locations, or several agencies producing material simultaneously needs rules that anticipate situations rather than a page of essentials.

A business trading on design, where the identity is part of the product, reasonably invests more in defining it.

And the one-page version depends on somebody having made sensible choices in the first place, since it records decisions rather than making them.

Write the page, put it with the files, send it to everybody producing anything, and expand it only when something specific keeps going wrong.

The page

1. Logo files, location, and which to use where.
2. Colour codes for screen and print.
3. Typeface and a fallback.
4. The exact name, written and spoken.
5. Minimum size and use on photographs.
6. Two pictures of correct material.
7. Store it with the logo files and date it.

Step four prevents the most visible failure, since a business appearing under two spellings of its own name looks less organised than one using a slightly wrong shade of blue.

Applying it across everything is covered in a brand that only exists on the website.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.