It's the last post in The Branding Series where I partnered with Creative Market! Today we're going to put our brand together into a brand style guide. This is a centralized place where your color palette lives, your patterns, fonts, logos, etc.

Your brand style guide is an ever-evolving thing as your business grows. It's a great thing to have on hand when designing new graphics for your business when you're making creative business decisions, or if you ever hire someone to do creative work in your business, you all have this style guide to look toward for decision making so everyone stays on brand.

I created a little template for you to put your style guide together. I would recommend using Canva but if you have another favorite graphic editing tool please feel free to use that. I used Canva so I'm going to walk you through how to put your guide together using it.

But first, click here to download the Brand Style Guide Template. You'll have to join the Maker Mob email list to get access to the Maker Resource Library to get the template.

Logo

In the last lesson, we created our logo, alternative logo(s), and our favicon. We're going to put these things in the top part of the style guide. Under "Logo" we'll put our main logo, under "Alternate" we'll put our alternative logos and finally, under "Submarks" we'll put our favicon and any other submark you created.

Typography

Next, we'll take the fonts we chose from lesson 4 and type out the name of the font then each letter in the alphabet both upper case and lower case along with each number. This helps us choose which font would be best for certain graphic designs.

If Canva doesn't have your font then you can use Paint, Photoshop, Gimp, or wherever else your font lives, create a little 300x150px box, type in your font then save the image and upload it to Canva. My Spelling Night font does not live in Canva so I use Gimp to input my font after designing my graphic in Canva.

Brand Style Guide for Maker-Monologues.com

Color Palette

We chose our brand colors in lesson 3. In Canva, you can choose different shapes like a circle (which is what I used), square, triangle, etc, and change the color of that element to your brand color by changing the hex color code. In Canva click Elements > Shapes and choose the shapes you want. To make them all the same size just resize one shape and click Copy at the top right of the editor and copy however many you need for the number of colors you have.

To change the color click the color square at the top in the editor > click the + under Document Colors > then change the Color code # and enter in the color code. Repeat for each element. If you have a metallic color, as I do with the copper, instead of using an element click Elements > Frames > and find the same shape frame as your color elements. Once you've sized to it match the rest, upload a photo of the color swatch Uploads > Upload your own image. Then drag that color swatch over your frame and it'll pop right in there.

Patterns + Textures

In lesson 6 we choose patterns + textures to use for our brand. For this part, we're going to do exactly as we did with uploading a color swatch and popping it into a frame. As you can see I don't have the patterns I chose from lesson 6. I was having a hard time figuring out how to change the colors of the patterns. I had to download a new software that allows me to do this and have yet to learn it.

But I do have my copper texture, my watercolor pattern I created in gimp with a watercolor brush, and also this crystal pattern I had for a while that I thought might go great with my brand. Still haven't decided on it but I added it to get a feel of how it will look with the rest of my brand style guide.

Graphic Elements

We chose some graphic elements from lesson 5 that were optional. I decided to not choose a graphic element right now. But I did include some crystals from the crystal pattern that I thought might be useful. We'll see.

Icons

This was also from lesson 5. We created our social media icons for our brand. I decided on making mine a copper sheen. You'll need to upload these as images to Canva and place them into your style guide, resize if needed.

Inspiration Images

This is from lesson 2, Brand Mood Board, where we created a Pinterest board full of things we loved that include colors, moods, concepts, scents even. Then we choose a few that we would be able to look back at to make sure everything we create in our business reflects these images.

If you remember, that cactus watercolor pattern was the entire inspiration for my color palette. Now my entire brand style guide reflects that.

Again, click here to download your Brand Style Guide Template to get started!

I hope you had fun with this DIY branding series! Huge thanks to Creative Market for supplying the tools needed to create all this awesome stuff.

I can't wait to see your Brand Style Guides, as always tag #MMBranding on Facebook and Instagram to show me your style guides!