Your website uses one blue and your sales deck uses another. The freelancer who wrote last month’s newsletter called your clients “customers.” And the AI tool that drafts your social captions ends every one with an exclamation point, so the company sounds nothing like the people who run it.
A brand style guide fixes that by writing the rules down once, somewhere everyone who makes content can find them. Below we walk through a brand style guide example from NASA and two more from government teams in the U.S. and U.K. Then we cover what your own guide needs, with a one-page version for small teams and rules for AI writing tools.
What is a brand style guide?
A brand style guide is a reference document that says how anything made for your company should look and sound. It covers your logos, colors, fonts, and images, plus your tone of voice and the words to use or avoid. Some companies call it a brand book. Whatever you call it, its main job is consistency, so a buyer who reads your proposal after visiting your website feels like they’re dealing with one company. That consistency also builds brand recognition, because people remember what they see repeatedly.
The guide is the part of brand management people open every day. For the bigger picture, here’s what brand management covers. Think of the guide as the operating manual anyone on your marketing team or at an outside agency reads before they start.
Brand guide, style guide, or brand guidelines: What’s the difference?
People use these names interchangeably, but the real difference is scope. Here’s how we define them with clients.
- A brand guide (or brand guidelines) covers the whole identity, including logo use, color, type, imagery, and voice.
- A style guide, in the editorial sense, covers writing only, such as spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and preferred terms.
- A design system turns the visual rules into reusable website components and code. It starts to matter once a developer builds on it.
If you have fewer than 50 employees, one document that combines the first two is enough. A design system usually comes later, once more than one person is building web pages.
Brand style guide examples worth studying
Big public guides are free to study and borrow from. Each of these brand style guide examples teaches something different.
NASA: Explain the reason behind each rule
NASA’s brand guidelines open with the agency’s insignia, the blue “meatball” James Modarelli designed in 1959. Before any rules, the guide explains what each part of the mark means (the vector stands for aeronautics and the stars stand for space). Then it gets specific about logo use, with preferred background colors, a protected clear space around the mark, and the insignia centered on its blue sphere. Each wrong version sits right next to the correct one.
Type is split by medium. Helvetica and Garamond are recommended for print, while NASA’s website uses Inter for headings, Public Sans for body copy, and DM Mono for numbers and small labels. Your guide can do the same on a smaller scale. Name one set of fonts for documents and another for the web, with a line on why you picked each.
U.S. Web Design System: Turn the rules into code
The U.S. Web Design System is the federal government’s design system, run by the General Services Administration. Its site says it supports nearly 200 websites. Colors, spacing, and type are stored as design tokens, which are named values a developer can reuse on any page. Nobody has to remember the exact blue, because the code already has it.
You don’t need a full design system to borrow the idea. Give your web developer your brand colors as HEX codes and your type sizes as named styles (H1, H2, body, caption). Ask them to set those up once in the theme’s global styles, so every new page starts on-brand.
GOV.UK: Settle small writing arguments once
The GOV.UK style guides include an A to Z list of writing decisions. It tells writers to use “and” instead of an ampersand, and to skip “eg” because screen readers can say it as “egg.” It also asks for numerals for almost every number, with “one” as the main exception.
Our blog spells out one to nine, and either choice works if everyone sticks to it. With an A to Z format, nobody argues the same question twice.
What should a brand style guide include?
If your brand already looks different on every channel, run a brand audit first so the guide fixes the problems you actually have. Then cover these elements of a brand style guide, roughly in this order. Keep your target audience in mind as you go. A firm that sells to hospitals should look and sound different from a skate shop.
Visual identity
- Logo usage rules for each version (full color, one color, and reversed), with clear-space and minimum-size measurements and a few examples of wrong use.
- Color palettes with HEX and RGB values for screens, CMYK and Pantone values for print, and a note on which color is reserved for buttons and links.
- Typefaces for headings and body text, plus a type scale that sets the size and line height of each heading level on the website and in documents.
- A photography and illustration style, shown with three or four sample images that fit and one that doesn’t.
- Icons, charts, and other graphics, if you use them.
Test every text and background pair before the palette is final. The W3C’s WCAG contrast guidance asks for a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal text. Large text, meaning 18 point or 14 point bold, needs 3:1. Print the measured ratio next to each approved pair, so nobody has to test it again.
Voice and words
Keep this section short and practical, or writers won’t use it. Describe your brand personality and tone in a few plain sentences, then give writers specifics they can check a draft against.
- A short description of tone, such as “direct and warm, never jokey in proposals.”
- A list of preferred and banned words, including what you call your clients.
- How to write your company name, product names, and job titles.
- Punctuation and number rules, even if that list is only 10 lines long.
Positioning belongs in your brand strategy document. The style guide can link to it and stick to how you look and sound.
Files and ownership
- A shared folder of brand assets, with logo files in SVG and PNG, font files or links, and templates for slides, proposals, and social posts.
- One named owner who approves changes and answers questions.
- A version number and the date of the last update.
A shared cloud folder updates in real time, so when the owner replaces a file, nobody is stuck working from an old download.
A one-page brand style guide for smaller teams
A five-person firm doesn’t need a 40-page PDF. A one-page brand style guide that people read beats a long one they skip, and you can build it in an afternoon. For a brand style guide example at small-business size, start with this outline.
- Your logo in the two versions you use most, with one clear-space rule.
- Two or three brand colors with HEX codes, plus one accent color just for buttons.
- One heading typeface and one body typeface.
- Three sentences on your tone and a list of 10 words or phrases to avoid.
- How to spell and capitalize the company name, with a link to the shared asset folder.
Pin it in your team chat and attach it to every freelancer brief. Grow it into a full guide when the team passes 15 people or you hire your first full-time designer.
A sample page from a 12-person firm’s guide
Here’s the color and logo page from a 12-person accounting firm’s one-page guide. The primary navy is HEX #003865, RGB 0 56 101, CMYK 100 60 10 53, and Pantone 2955 C for printed letterhead. White text on that navy measures 11.98:1, so it passes at any size.
The accent orange, HEX #E87722, is where testing pays off. White button text on it measures 2.96:1, which fails even the large-text minimum. The firm kept that orange for icons and dividers and moved its buttons to a darker burnt orange, #B85C00, which measures 4.6:1 against white. WCAG says not to round, so a shade at 4.49:1 would still fail.
The logo rule takes two lines. Clear space on every side equals the height of the capital F in the wordmark. The logo never prints narrower than one inch or displays below 120 pixels wide. The type scale comes last, with website headings at 40, 28, and 22 pixels and body text at 18 pixels on a 1.5 line height. Proposals use 11-point body text.
What a finished rule looks like
Rules are easier to follow with an example next to them. Say the same firm’s tone rule is “sound like a calm advisor, with no hype.” Under it, the guide shows one sentence that follows the rule, like “We’ll file your extension by Friday and send you a copy,” and one that breaks it, like “Tax season is HERE and we’re SO ready!!”
A writer or an AI tool can check a draft against those two lines in seconds, which a vague word like “friendly” can’t do. Do the same for visual standards by putting a correct logo placement next to a wrong one. Creative teams move faster with paired examples, which answer what a written rule leaves open.
Rules for AI tools, freelancers, and agencies
Much of a small company’s content is now drafted by freelancers, agencies, or AI writing tools. None of them absorbed your brand by sitting in your meetings, so the guide has to supply that context, especially for day-to-day social media posting.
- Keep a plain-text copy of the voice section, since AI tools read editable text more reliably than words inside images.
- Paste your tone description, your words-to-avoid list, and one or two sample paragraphs into each tool’s saved instructions.
- Give freelancers and agencies the brand assets folder on day one, so nobody pulls your logo from an image search.
- Say who reviews outside work before it goes live, and how long that review takes.
- Ask agencies to send back editable source files when a project wraps up.
Automation tools can format pages and flag ones that break the rules. Changing a rule should still be one person’s call, or the guide drifts every time someone asks a chatbot for a new shade of blue.
Common mistakes to avoid when making a brand style guide
These are the mistakes we see most when a company asks us to help create brand guidelines.
- Making a long, beautiful PDF that nobody opens after launch.
- Covering color, typography, and logo files in detail and skipping voice entirely.
- Writing rules without examples, so every designer reads them differently.
- Leaving the guide with the agency that made it, with no owner inside the company.
- Setting rules your own website already breaks.
That last one is common after a website project, so check your homepage and proposal template against the new guide before you send it out.
How to update the guide after a rebrand
A rebrand makes the old guide out of date overnight. If you’re in the middle of one, our rebranding checklist covers the full sequence. The steps below are just for the guide.
- Update the version number and date on the cover, and add a short note on what changed.
- Replace every file in the asset folder, and move the old logo files to an archive freelancers can’t reach.
- Update the saved instructions in every AI tool your team uses.
- Send the new guide to every freelancer and agency, with a set date for switching over.
- Check your website, email signatures, and templates against it within 30 days.
- Put the next review on the calendar for six months from today.
Frequently asked questions
How do brand style guides improve marketing consistency?
They give everyone the same reference, so a freelancer or an AI tool makes the decisions you would without having to ask you first. They also speed up approvals, since a reviewer can point to a written rule when something looks off.
How do brand style guides help with website design?
A designer or developer can set your colors, fonts, and button styles once in the site’s theme, and every new page picks them up. The guide also cuts down on revision rounds, because the visual decisions are made before design starts. If your developer uses design tokens, as the U.S. Web Design System does, the guide becomes part of the code.
How much does it cost to hire someone to create a brand style guide?
The price depends mostly on whether your logo, colors, and voice already exist. Writing down an identity you already have is a smaller project than creating one from scratch, and a one-page guide costs less than a full guide with templates. Ask for a quote that lists which files you’ll get and who owns them.
How do you create a brand style guide for a new business?
Start with the one-page version: your logo, two or three colors, two fonts, a few sentences on tone, and a list of words to avoid. Use it for 90 days, note where people still had questions, and add those answers to the document. That’s how to create a brand style guide that grows with the company.
Start with one page this week
Open a blank document today and write the one-page version from memory. Every question you can’t answer, like a HEX code or which logo file is current, is a gap your team is filling with guesses right now.
If you’d like a team to build the full guide with you, see our company branding and brand guidelines service.