Does your brand have a style guide? If you just said no, this blog is for you. In 2025, consumers are becoming more attuned to how brands present themselves to the market, necessitating the need for a clear, consistent presence that genuinely reflects who you are and what it is you stand for. This is where style guides come in. In this blog, we’ll discuss what a style guide is, key inclusions, and how it can help your brand be noticed, more authentic, and impactful.
What is a Style Guide?
A style guide is your brand’s rule book, defining how it should be visually and verbally represented across all touchpoints – from web, print marketing, to social media and more. It outlines everything there is to know about your brand, such as your:
- Mission or vision statement
- Core values
- Taglines/other important wording
- Voice and tone
- Grammar preferences
- Logo usage (e.g., variations, what to do/not to do)
- Colour palette (e.g., different variations, what to do/not to do)
- Photo & icon usage
- Typography.
Its purpose? To guide internal teams, agencies, and freelancers – ensuring your brand’s purpose and appearance are communicated clearly (like ours below!) and consistently because this can majorly impact how you are perceived within the market. Let’s explore this further!
4 Reasons Why a Style Guide is Important
1. Maintain Brand Integrity
Firstly—and most importantly—style guides ensure your marketing aligns with your brand’s identity and core values. Research shows that 89% of consumers choose brands they relate to on a personal level (Wunderman 2017), necessitating the need to reflect these values in everything you say, do, and create. Where this is inconsistent or excluded entirely, brands risk:
- Appearing untrusthworthy
- Damaging their reputation
- Losing this emotional connection with their consumers.
2. Increases Brand Recognition
Firstly, style guides play a crucial role in building brand recognition. As visual beings, we’re naturally drawn to designs that are clean, cohesive, and eye-catching—so much so that 81% of consumers will remember a brand’s colour palette over its name (Chinery 2019). As such, this makes consistent, visually compelling branding a requirement at every touchpoint– be it packaging, print, website, or social media. Because inconsistent, disjointed branding is unprofessional and increases the consumers’ difficulty piecing together your brand throughout their shopping journey.
This is where style guides come in. Establishing clear rules for the use of branding assets (i.e., logos, colours, imagery, typography) helps ensure all marketing material speaks to your brand’s look and personality, so it’s not only recognisable at all touchpoints, but also memorable at the most important stage – the final purchase.
3. Strengthens Brand Trust
Building on point one, how your brand presents itself can also directly impact consumer trust. Inconsistent use of branding elements (i.e., mismatched fonts, different colour combinations, wrong logo design or placement) can make a brand appear disorganised or worst case, fake. Consequently, this can also cause consumers to question the reliability of your products/services.
With 81% of consumers stating that brand trust is a deal-breaker when shopping (Howarth 2024), using a style guide is essential to eliminate these inconsistencies and create a seamless, professional experience – one that instils confidence, not drives potential consumers towards competing brands.
4. Improved Team Communication & Productivity
While style guides primarily offer benefits from the consumer perspective, they also help streamline the design process, contributing to a stress-free, happy team environment. This is especially valuable when designers, copywriters, and marketers are working together, as having a clear set of rules helps eliminate back-tracking, mistakes, or worse—guesswork. Overall, this clarity leads to:
- Fewer unnecessary revisions
- Faster client approvals (meaning assets will go to market faster!)
- A team that is well-aligned, productive, and time-efficient.
- Cost-cuts!
In turn, this helps generate smoother workflow, greater team collaboration, and the reassurance that the marketing accurately speaks to your brand’s identity. Just make sure you regularly look over your style guide and revise it if needed (outdated information is as bad as having no brand guide at all).
Check out the style guide we created for Magnium Cricket below!
Concluding Thoughts
To conclude, this blog demonstrates why style guides are such an important asset for every brand – big or small. By enforcing set brand-guidelines, this will ensure all visual and verbal marketing materials are accurate, on-brand, and impactful. In turn, this will help generate increased brand recognition, strengthened consumer trust, improved team collaboration and productivity, and most importantly, brand credibility.
Want to invest in a style guide? Our expert designers at Adlab are here to assist. We’re experienced in creating style guides for all brands, whether you’re just starting up or wanting to update an existing one. Let’s have a chat so you can promote with confidence today!