A brand style guide is the document that tells anyone making something for your business how it should look and sound: which version of the logo to use, the exact colours, the typefaces, the kind of photos, the tone of the words. Big companies publish guides that run to a hundred pages. A small business needs a fraction of that, and the short version is the one that actually gets used.
We design logos and brand identities, so we have an interest in this subject. But the most useful style guides we see are rarely the most elaborate ones. They are the ones that answer the questions a printer, a new employee or a freelance designer will ask on day one, with exact values rather than adjectives.
Why a small business needs one at all
Without written rules, a brand drifts. Nobody decides to stretch the logo or use a slightly different blue. It happens one flyer, one social post and one supplier at a time, and within a year the business has four versions of its own colour. The guide is cheap insurance against that.
It also saves real money and time. A printer who receives exact colour values does not have to guess. A web developer who receives your typefaces and colour pairs does not have to sample them from a screenshot. And when you change agencies or hire a marketing assistant, the guide is the handover.
1. Logo versions and the rules for using them
This is the section that does the most work. List every version of the logo you have, and say where each one belongs:
- Primary logo - the full version, for anywhere it has room: your website header, signage, letterheads.
- Secondary or stacked version - a rearranged layout for square or narrow spaces.
- Icon or submark - a simplified mark for small spaces such as social profile pictures and the browser tab icon.
- One-colour and reversed versions - for single-colour printing, embroidery, and dark or photographic backgrounds.
Then add three rules with numbers attached:
- Clear space. How much empty space must surround the logo. The usual way to express it is relative to part of the logo itself, such as the height of one letter, so it scales with the logo.
- Minimum size. The smallest the full logo can appear before it stops being legible, in pixels for screens and millimetres or inches for print. Below that size, use the icon instead.
- Misuse examples. Show, with pictures, what not to do: stretching, recolouring, adding shadows or outlines, rotating, and placing the full-colour logo on a busy photo. One page of crossed-out examples prevents more mistakes than any amount of prose.
If you are not sure which logo files you should have in the first place, our guide to what files you should get when you buy a logo covers the full handover list, including how to check that a "vector" file really is one.
2. Colours, with exact codes and the pairs that pass
Keep the palette small: one or two primary brand colours, a neutral or two for text and backgrounds, and at most one accent. For each colour, record the exact values for every place it will be used: HEX for the web, RGB for screens, CMYK for print, and a Pantone reference if you print on materials other than paper. "Our blue" is not a colour code; #01A5D3 is.
Most templates stop there. The section we would add, and that almost no small business guide includes, is a short list of which colour combinations are allowed for text. This is where a style guide meets accessibility, and it is where well-meaning brands often go wrong.
What the accessibility standard actually requires
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), the standard most accessibility rules and lawsuits refer to, set out minimum contrast between text and its background:
- Normal text: at least 4.5:1.
- Large text: at least 3:1. WCAG defines large text as at least 18 point, or 14 point bold. On a website that is roughly 24 pixels regular or 18.5 pixels bold.
- Buttons, form borders and meaningful icons: at least 3:1 against the colours next to them, under a separate criterion for non-text contrast.
Here is the detail that matters for a style guide. WCAG says plainly that "text that is part of a logo or brand name has no contrast requirement". Your logo is exempt. Your website's headings, body text and buttons are not, even when they use the logo's colours.
A worked example
Take a bright orange such as #FFA500. Put white text on it and the contrast ratio is roughly 2:1, which fails the 4.5:1 minimum for normal text and even the 3:1 minimum for large text. Put near-black text on the same orange and the ratio is above 10:1, which passes comfortably. The orange is fine. The pairing is the problem.
So the colour page of a good guide includes a few lines like these:
- Dark text on brand orange: approved for all text sizes.
- White text on brand orange: not approved for text. Use for decorative shapes only.
- Brand orange text on white: large headings only, if it passes 3:1. Never body text.
Any free online contrast checker will give you the ratio for a pair of HEX codes in seconds. Check each pair once, write the result in the guide, and nobody has to think about it again. If accessibility is new to you, our article on whether your small business website is ADA compliant explains why contrast is one of the most common failures we find.
3. Typefaces and how to use them
Name the typefaces exactly, including the weights you use. Usually that means one face for headings and one for body text, sometimes the same family in two weights. Then set a simple hierarchy: what a main heading, a subheading, body text and a caption look like, with sizes. On the web, a body size of around 16 pixels is a sensible floor.
Also record where each font comes from and what its licence covers. A typeface that is licensed for your designer's computer is not automatically licensed for your website, your app or your staff. Open source fonts, such as most of Google Fonts, avoid most of this: the SIL Open Font License explicitly allows them to be used in logos and commercial design work. We cover the font questions in more depth in the logo files guide, so we will not repeat them here.
Finally, name a fallback: the system font to use in an email signature or a document when the brand font is not installed. Otherwise everyone picks their own, and that is how a brand ends up in Comic Sans.
4. Photography and imagery
This section stops your website, social posts and brochures from looking like they belong to three different businesses. It does not need rules for every situation. A few short descriptions and examples do the job:
- The feel. Bright and natural, or moody and high-contrast? People at work, or products on clean backgrounds?
- Real versus stock. If you use stock photos, say what kind. If you have your own photography, say that it comes first.
- Illustration and icons. If you use them, one style only, in your brand colours.
- Three approved and three rejected examples. Pictures settle arguments that adjectives start.
One practical addition for websites: a line reminding whoever uploads images to write a short description of each one for screen readers and search engines. It costs nothing and is easy to forget.
5. Voice and tone
How the business sounds is part of the brand, and it is the section small businesses most often leave out. Keep it practical:
- Three words that describe the voice, each with a "but not" clause. For example: friendly but not jokey, confident but not pushy, clear but not curt.
- A few house rules. Do you write "we" or the business name? US or UK spelling? How do you write your own name, your prices and your phone numbers?
- How tone shifts by situation. A sales page, a complaint reply and a late-payment reminder should not sound identical, but they should sound like the same business.
- One before-and-after example of a sentence rewritten into the house voice.
What you can safely leave out
Large brand books include mission statements, brand archetypes, persona research and pages of mood boards. Some of that is valuable inside a large company. In a small business, it mostly makes the document long enough that nobody opens it. If a section does not change what someone will actually make, it can wait.
The same goes for templates. Ready-made social post, presentation and letterhead templates are useful, but they are a separate deliverable. A guide without them is still a guide.
A one-page version you can start with today
If you do nothing else, put these on a single page and share it with everyone who makes anything for your business:
- Your logo versions, with a one-line note on where each is used.
- Clear space and minimum size.
- Your colours with HEX, RGB and CMYK values.
- The approved text and background colour pairs.
- Your typefaces, weights and a fallback system font.
- Three words for your voice, each with a "but not".
- A link to the folder where the logo files live.
That page will prevent most of the inconsistency a small brand ever suffers. Expand it when you hire, rebrand or start working with more suppliers.
When to update it
Revisit the guide whenever something changes: a new logo version, a new colour, a new website. A guide that disagrees with your live website is worse than none, because people stop trusting it. Put a date on the front and keep one copy that everyone links to, rather than versions attached to old emails.
If you are commissioning a new identity, decide at the start whether usage guidelines are part of the job, and include it in your project brief. It affects the price, as we explain in our guide to how much logo design costs, and it is much easier to produce while the designer still has every decision fresh.
Need a hand?
We design logos and complete brand identities, including the usage guidelines that keep them consistent, and we build websites that apply those rules properly, contrast checks included. If you would like a brand guide put together for an existing logo, or a full identity from scratch, get in touch.
