Creating A Style Guide For Your Personal Brand (Pre-Game)
To start the series off, I wanted to begin on the topic of style guides. Style guides are documents that describes a brands values, themes, colors, logos, and other guidelines that dictate the brands appearance and culture. When most people think of brands, they usually think of the colors, logo, and font choice--plus the other things like placement, and improper usage. However, there is much more to it than that. There are other things you can add like voice and tone, social media and grammar guidelines, how to capitalize certain items in the company, what things need trademarks, etc.
And Now You Are Probably Wondering,...
"Why are you talking about this before we have even talked about any of the other components that make this thing up?" Well, I wanted to talk about what a style guide is in terms of a brief overview, before I started talking about the pieces. This way you can know what you are building up to. You can even add to the document you are working on as you go through the discussions so that when you are finished reading, you will have your entire style guide ready to go for creating your first posts and crafting cohesively messaged photos and logos.
Before I go any further, I would like to suggest you start looking at learning a desktop publishing application, since they are best suited for typesetting and organizing complex documents like this. I use Scribus, which is open source and full of features! A quick Google search will allow you to find it.
Here are a few things I added. When you make your style guide, make what you need (I will suggest more sections later)
You can add this to talk about what your brand is about, the main message you want to send and what actions allow you to convey that message.
For me, I wanted to be known as a well-rounded entrepreneurial optimist. I wrote a three paragraph summary discussing
I would like to note that I discern interests as nouns (typography and programming for example) and what I do as actions (such as learning new things or envisioning solutions to new problems)
This is where you describe, show, and argue for your logo. Explain why it looks the way it looks and how each element expresses your message. This is also where you can describe how your logo should look in color and black and white. *I also added placement with the tagline, but you can give that its own section if preferred.
My current logo is a collar and tie which also creates the first and middle initial of my name. This expresses the professionalism and thoughtfulness that I want to put into all of my work and communications.
As the name suggests, this is where you list your color choices and when to use them.
I wanted to continue my message of optimism, so I went for a vibrant orange accent with a neutral gray for backgrounds, blues for links and a softer black for text to even out the intensity of the accent color.
This is where you list the reasoning for your font choices and when they should be used.
I will get into detail about the fonts I chose in later discussions. I added samples of how the different elements would fit together, but I believe you can create a separate section if you felt the need to.
The voice section is to establish a common writing style as well as what you want your writing to project to your audience.
I wanted to communicate wit and humor without being too silly. I noted that I prefer longer sentence structures and write confidently without being bossy.
Tone is the way you talk to different groups. Sometimes you need to be super formal, sometimes you need to be casual. This is typically more important for businesses with various customer segments.
For me, I broke it up into coworkers versus friends versus employers.
If you are planning on or are using social media platforms to brand yourself, this is definitely a section you need. You should describe how to use each platform to message yourself, what type of content you will be serving your audience and how it will be unique for each.
I will describe my usage in a later discussion.
Some people make a Templates section to show how different documents would utilize the design elements.
Others use an actual Style section to describe how to use common company words. Since this is a personal style guide, I use the AP stylebook since I have a copy and it covers pretty much everything that you might write about. You can get a copy at http://www.apstylebook.com/ .
Another section you might want to add is improper usage of text, logos, or colors. This might not be so bad if it is only for yourself, but adding it never hurts.
These sections are certainly not set in stone and neither is the content you place in them, this is merely how I implemented the style guide. I am also not a professional, but I would like to grow in this area to become proficient enough to do so. If anyone has any suggestions on how to create a better outline or wish to share how they create their style guides, please send feedback!
Now that I have outlined the sections, we can begin next time in more detail.
I cannot wait to continue this journey with you guys!
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