Publish a brand book to unify your brand voice and establish a style guide.
Say goodbye to confusion and miscommunication between team members and contractors by keeping everyone on the same page with a centralized brand book. Using Issuu's brand book maker takes the guesswork out of the equation and ensures your brand is presented consistently across all platforms.
What is a brand book?
A brand book or style guide is a comprehensive reference document that clearly defines the visual identity of your brand.
Creating a style guide clears up many of the obstacles all brands encounter when crafting marketing and promotional materials. The style guide will define the type of font your brand uses, the HEX code of your brand's colors, rules such as “&’s cannot take the place of ‘and’ for any reason,” dimensions of photo and video assets, even customer personas and positioning statements can be included.
Creating a style guide is often referred to as creating a “brand bible” because it clearly states rules and guidelines that all team members are able to easily refer to and incorporate in content they create. Without a style guide maker, everything you produce that is client-facing would ultimately have to be reviewed with a fine-tooth comb, which would further occupy too much of your valuable time. In that way, a brand book is considered a huge time saver.
Our brand book maker lets you make sure your brand is always putting its best foot forward. Customers respond to a unified look and voice. When you create an online style guide, you can go a few steps further. You can easily add links, incorporate video, and even edit in real-time if you make the decision to change your voice, tone, colors, or visual style. Your edited style guide is easily shared with your team instantly!
How to build a brand book:
The first step to creating a style guide is to upload it as a PDF. (Or you can upload .doc, .docx, or .ppt file types or import your files directly from Dropbox or Google Drive).
Our brand book maker gives you everything you need to add videos and links to take your brand book to the next level.
Embed directly on your company’s website for easy access. When you create a style guide online, embedding is as simple as 1-2-3!
Your style guide should be as immersive and dynamic as you are. Enable the Fullscreen feature in Issuu’s style guide maker to capture the attention and imagination of your reader.
Video
It’s like “show & tell” for adults.
Establishing a brand voice and visual identity can’t always be summed up in a few written sentences. Our brand book maker lets you easily incorporate helpful videos that can explain the many nuances of your visual identity along with examples of best practices.
Add Links
Links make your style guide interactive.
Add links and make it super easy to navigate. This feature is what will bring your style guide to life. Create a style guide that links with the rest of your posts and relevant content around the web. Adding links is a great way to include stats and sources directly in your text.
Embed
Make it accessible.
Our style guide maker lets you embed directly to your website to be accessed in a flash. Your style guide is one of your business’ most important reference materials. You can ensure that it can always be accessed because your team will utilize it often.
Take a look at these other brand books made with Issuu:
Brand Book: Frequently Asked Questions
When you create a style guide for your brand, it’s important to include everything you can to create an easy-to-follow roadmap of your brand identity. This often looks like buyer personas and positioning statements, color palettes with HEX codes for each color, logos, images with dimensions, brand elements, and fonts complete with clear guidelines of proper usage.
Brand guidelines are a must-have for your marketing and sales team. Brand guidelines are like guard rails for the creative team to stay within the parameters of your brand's voice and tone. The guidelines extend beyond ad campaigns and other client-facing work because they even add a unified tone to internal communications as well.
To put it bluntly, not having a style guide only leads to chaos! Without a style guide, your logo could be presented with different shades of color, your brand voice would be different across each channel, and your visual content would have no flow or context. To effectively communicate with a unified vision and identity, creating a style guide is an absolute necessity for all brands, big and small.
While opinions may vary, we have concluded that developing brand guidelines must include a few elements. The first is understanding who your brand is as if they were a person. What are your brand's values and what do they stand for? What is their “vibe?” What are their key characteristics and what is their mission? From there, the creative process really takes hold in defining colors, fonts, and images. The final part is establishing the rules of how to best incorporate all of these individual elements, so they manifest into a unified brand voice.
