Web creators and business owners alike know how crucial it is to solidify their brand identity, with the ultimate goal of building a presence that resonates with website visitors and clients alike. Brand guidelines are certainly the ticket to consistent, powerful branding, and there’s no better place to look for inspiration than at breathtaking brand style guides done by design experts themselves.
A brand style guide is a compilation of guidelines that spells out the elements of a brand’s identity and design system, such as logo, color palette, typography, imagery, and more. The role of a brand style guide is to serve as a reference for designers, writers, and content creators alike for how to represent the brand in the design assets and content they create. While different brands have unique and individualistic ways of how they craft their style guide, their goal is uniform: to ensure brand consistency and clarify what they stand for.
In this post, we’ll explore seven prime examples of brand style guides across a variety of disciplines, all of which inspire us as web creators in our ongoing mission to improve our own brand identity when designing websites, visual assets, and brand content at large.
Layers of Logo Design
From our perspective, one of our most favorite things about Skyscanner’s brand style guide is the way they illustrate their brand personality, by specifying the thought process behind their brand assets. For example, exhibiting the formation of their logo design and how it combines four illustrations, each one symbolizing a different brand value, and how they morphed these four graphics into one cohesive illustration.
This logo design process as depicted by Skyscanner can actually be considered a case study in the outcome of the brainstorming and rounds of iterations that make up the process of designing a brand’s logo from scratch.
A best practice in logo design is to draw sketches of various images that illustrate and symbolize what your brand represents and eventually to produce a final logo that combines these different ideas. If you look closely, you can see that the semi-circle in both the “Optimism” and “Ideas” images is combined with a derivative of the downward “Destinations” arrow. Given the circular nature of Skyscanner’s new symbol, the “Sustainability” globe is also incorporated into their finalized symbol.
