What Is a Style Guide? | Graphic Design

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So what is a style guide? A style guide is a guide made by designers, usually for either other designers or other people within an organization to know how to use the assets that have been designed for that company. In which case, now we'll take a look at Skype's branding guideline.

So, a guideline or a branding guideline, also known as a style guide, also known as an asset guideline. There's so many different names that it has, but what it does is it actually tells a story. It tells you how the logo came about, how to use their logo, what not to use their logo on.

So, for this one, Skype says the dos and the don'ts, where don't put red behind it because there's no red in the Skype logo. Or don't change the orientation. Don't put a drop shadow. It also tells you what typefaces they use. They use different ones like Arial, Tahoma and on Mac they use Helvetica and Lucida Grande and then they also tell you which colors that they also use as well.

A style guide is important because it helps keep your brand consistent. It lets your customers know that you care and it lets your designers know also that you care about the work that you've done for them. That means not stretching their logo or not putting it against like, a flashing background, or not using the colors that were specifically chosen for your organization from your branding strategies.

Style guides are really important because sometimes the same designer won't remain on for the project and the new designer needs to know how to treat certain things or where to find the files to do certain things that the website may need.

It's important to include a style guide in your design because it shows that you're thinking ahead, and it shows that you have really put like, the thought and the care that goes into branding a company and making sure that you not only explain it, but respect it.