The 10 Most Beautiful Brand Book and Style Guide Examples

Inspiration for Creating the Most Beautiful Brand Books and Style Guides

How do you keep everybody in your organization using your brand consistently? By providing them with the most beautiful brand book and a brand style guide of course. They are similar documents that can be key tools for brand management. And what are some examples of excellent brand books and styles guides that you can use for inspiration? You see, the brand of your organization is ideally built from its purpose or core idea, with the visual and tangible elements as a prime identifier of it. It may help to think of your organization’s brand expressed through four key channels:

1. Product
2. Environment (Physical or Digital)
3. Communication
4. Behavior

Recommended readings: 10 Best Tech Company Brand Books, 10 Best Retail Company Brand Books and Style Guides

What’s the Difference Between a Brand Book and a Style Guide?

• A brand book inspires and helps keep people in your organization aligned with the purpose or core idea of your organization, and helps them think, communicate, and act from that purpose as a starting point.
• A style guide helps the people inside and outside of your organization who use your visual brand assets, to use them consistently and correctly.

As you can see, a brand book is geared more toward meaning and inspiration, while a style guide is geared toward maintaining visual brand consistency. The two documents together form a major part of your brand guidelines. They are the logbook for a brand’s identity. They are not just a document that collects information about your brand. Brand guidelines are key to brand alignment.

Storing brand guidelines on a PDF document and sharing updated versions repeatedly will lead to misalignment because so many versions exist. It becomes a hassle for your colleagues to find out which file is the correct one and whose hard drive is on.

If all your stakeholders know how to find your brand guidelines, know what they are and how they apply to their specific role, you have achieved brand alignment, a critical measure when it comes to customer attraction and satisfaction.

The 10 Most Beautiful Brand Books and Style Guides

Here is a selection of our favorite brand books and brand style guide examples:

Love to Ride Brand Book

Love to Ride is an online bicycle community with a mission to encourage people to bike. The book is colorful and does not contain much text.

The Red Cross Style Guide

The Red Cross keeps it short and simple. This brand poster tells you everything you need to know about Red Cross brand guidelines in a PDF.

Cisco Brand Book

Cisco has decided to create interactive brand guidelines that really highlight the brand in an interactive way.

Coca Cola Brand Book

Coca-Cola’s brand book beautifully displays what associations and emotions the brand should evoke in its consumers. You do not have to say a lot to emit a strong message. Coca Cola’s style guide is the go-to place for many partners.

I Love NY Brand Book

Urban and stylish. These two words sum up I Love NY’s brand guidelines.

Macaroni Grill Brand Book

This attractive and illustrative brand style guide has a warm, Italian feel to it. Macaroni Grill uses the word “crave” as an acronym and chooses keywords that fit the brand.

Scrimshaw Coffee Brand Guidelines

A little pinch of retro. Scrimshaw Coffee’s brand guidelines.

Google Style Guide

Clean and clear. This is how Google presents itself. You can imagine that largest brands like Google need to display in an uncomplicated way how the brand elements are allowed to be displayed. Google’s brand guidelines are key to brand consistency.

Spotify Brand Guidelines

Spotify is not only known for its logo. It has been using other brand elements that are recognizable as well. In Spotify’s brand guidelines, you can clearly understand how all elements that make the Spotify brand, may or may not be used.

Apple Brand Book

Having such a strong brand as Apple and thousands of re-sellers, a book and style guide are a real must.

How Can You Ensure Brand Alignment Using Your Brand Book and Style Guide?

Easy, just follow the steps outlined below:

1. Determine your brand’s identity and produce your brand book and style guide.
2. Make your brand guidelines accessible to your partners and colleagues.
3. Allow your colleagues access to all content that forms the brand’s property.
4. Lead by example by always communicating in an on-brand manner.
5. Provide templates for your posts on social media, and presentations.

Do you want to store all your brand elements in one place and create your brand book and style guide in an easy and efficient manner? Lytho helps you streamline your entire workflow and harmonize all brand collateral under a single, uniform platform. Feel free to reach out to us by scheduling a demo and learning how our creative solutions can boost the effectiveness of your creative projects. We look forward to speaking with you!