Creative Tips #14: Making a Style Book

Your business needs a style book so that all of your letters, proposals, fliers and assorted promotion will have the same look. This is not just a nice idea. It is an important part of differentiating your company, organization or nonprofit in its market. It also makes the difference between looking like a professional company and being more or less invisible.

Depending on the type of business you are in, you might want to look beautiful, dynamic, powerful, sexy or conservative. That isn't the point; there are some highly successful marketing professionals whose trademark "look" is very plain indeed. What is the point is that everything you send out on paper or on the web should be instantly identifiable as coming from your company and no other.

Start With Your Logo

Let's assume that you hired a good designer to create your corporate identity, and you now have a knockout logo that really expresses who and what you are. That's great, and the first thing you should do is make three backup copies of all the artwork and keep them in three separate secure locations. I know I said that last time. I make no apology for repeating it. Those files are some of the most valuable assets you have.

There are a lot of things to know about a logo and how to use it, far too many to go into here, but the first and most important one is: Don't Change It! That means don't change the colors, don't squeeze it or stretch it to "fit" in some overcrowded piece of promotion, don't change the spacing of the letters or their proportions, don't change the amount of "white space" around it on a page (including a web page).

Consistency is the watchword where your corporate identity is concerned, and nowhere is that more true than with your logo. Imagine if Starbucks used random colors or shapes instead of that trademark round green sign? What if UPS trucks were any old shade of brown? Okay, sure, it wouldn't be the end of Civilization As We Know It, but I guarantee that neither company would be nearly as successful if they lost that repetition factor: exactly that logo, exactly those colors, over and over and over again. Repetition creates recognition and familiarity. Most people prefer what's familiar. That's why brands and trademarks work.

Part One of your style book should be all about the use of your logo.

Mail and Email

The next item up is the visual appearance of your correspondence. The book must specify the template to use for company letters, for statements of account, for sales proposals. If there isn't a template (and there should be!), and even if there is, the style book specifies exactly:

All but the last one can be set up in advance in a template file and stored on the computer (or network server) each time a letter has to be written. Word, Open Office and WordPerfect all support and use templates to make document production faster and more accurate. I believe a corporate identity package should include at least letter and envelope templates for the client to use, but I also know that I'm in a minority, so most businesses don't have them.

The Microsoft Office website has thousands of "canned" templates to choose from that you can adapt, but I strongly recommend that if your corporate identity designer hasn't supplied templates, make your own. In the first place, you will find out how to create a template: a very useful skill in its own right. In the second place, you can use your own first template as a model for the others you create for your business, which will save you a lot of repetitive work.

The same goes for email. Everyone in the company should be using the same font, same layout and a branded email signature that is the same from person to person, except for their title.

Bonus Tip

Speaking of email, if you want to establish credibility in your market, DO NOT use a generic email domain like gmail.com, yahoo.com, or live.com. You need to purchase your own domain name (it's very cheap) and set up with a hosting company that will give you plenty of email addresses. Today you can get web hosting (from which you can run your website) with an unlimited number of email addresses for less than $100 a year. That tiny investment is more than paid for by having an email address like "johnsmith@acmewidgets.com" instead of "johnsmith9377@gmail.com".

Your company-branded email addresses say you're serious about what you do, you are a professional and you are here to stay. This is the 21st Century, after all.

Happy typesetting,

Alan Gilbertson
Creative Director
G&G Creative

The Creative Tips newsletter is published by G&G Creative, Tujunga, CA. More at www.gngcreative.com or on the blog.

G&G Creative specializes in graphic design, photography and copy writing for print and the web.

Copyright © 2009 Alan Gilbertson. All Rights Reserved.