From the course: UX Foundations: Style Guides and Design Systems

Brand and company philosophy

From the course: UX Foundations: Style Guides and Design Systems

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Brand and company philosophy

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- Style guides typically start life as a set of brand guidelines. Most brand guidelines set out the rules for how and where the brand logo or logo type can be used, what the brand colors are, what font faces and weights are used in each situation, and perhaps, also, a description of acceptable visual elements, like what kinds of photography or other images are brand compliant. This is a great starting point, but it doesn't really describe style so much as visual identity. The company's style is how it shows its personality through those visuals and also through the words you choose to use. For instance, it might be clear from your company's logo that you're a playful company, or serious or forward thinking, but how do you expect content creators to extend that personality in their work? To determine that personality, you have to start by understanding the company's philosophy. The personality you choose has to demonstrate that philosophy. Think of it this way, brand is the company's promise to its customers. Branding is how that promise is communicated online, in print, on TV, and so on. Carrying through on the promise is a major element of great customer satisfaction, so you need to augment your brand guidelines with some branding information, and that's one extra element of the style guide. The style guide is something that helps content creators understand what your company is about, what values it stands for, what its personality is, and how to display that personality in the information that the company publishes to the world. This is why it's important for you to be able to distill the company's brand and philosophy into something that you can easily communicate. I'm not talking about the CEO's annual letter to shareholders, and I'm not talking about the latest marketing catchphrase. Instead, I mean using plain language to say why the company exists, who it serves, how it serves them, and what it hopes to achieve by doing this. Making this explicit will mean people are much more likely to create suitable content the first time, and so it'll save you from a ton of governance work later on. If users of the style guide understand the reasoning behind the style, then they'll be better able to apply it in the content they create. That's why I suggest that you start your style guide with a really brief description of the company philosophy and how that translates into the brand and branding elements that the style guide contains. You don't need to say much, just a paragraph on the philosophy and then a couple more paragraphs on what that means for the style that content creators should use. There's a really important reason for describing this philosophy clearly. It means that everyone who creates content for the company will understand the basic sentiment of the organization, and they can build on that sentiment in everything they create. That way their content will fit better with the overall message that the company provides. Almost every organization has a web presence. The content on those websites needs to quickly show visitors what the organization is about. A charity dedicated to saving endangered species will probably have a very different underlying philosophy to a financial investment company. The way that a content creator writes for either of those sites will, in turn, be very different. Exactly how they write is driven by the style guide. So the style guide has to sum up the company philosophy in a way that makes it easy to express in written and visual content.

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