With branding, consistency is paramount.To ensure that everyone’s on the same page, large companies often have a detailed branding guidelines document.For your school or tutoring business, you don’t need to go crazy and hire teams of expert graphic designer, but it is worth spending a little bit of time coming up with a simple brand style sheet. Doing this early on will help you to avoid a messy or inconsistent look down the road.
So what should you include?
There are just three main things to consider at first:
- Logo
- Colours
- Fonts
Logo
Your business of course needs a logo.On your style sheet, you should include two logos - one in full colour and one in black & white or monochrome. Depending on your logo design, the monochrome version might need to be tweaked a little to make it legible.
You might also consider including a favicon version. A favicon is a very small image, typically just 16 x 16 pixels, which you can see beside a website’s name in your browser tab. Because it’s so small, it’s a good idea to have a simplified version of your main logo if that has a lot of detail, or if it’s long, rather than square in shape.
(Special thanks to Lea Hook from Phone English for allowing me to use his logo and favicon as an example.)
Colours
Colours are most often overlooked.
Brands typically have at least a primary and a secondary colour.
The primary colour could be the most dominant colour in your logo, or one that compliments it. You can use this simple online colour picker to get the hex and RGB values for your chosen colours, which you should then add to your style sheet.
Fonts
With fonts, less is always more. Think back to nausea we all experienced in the mid-90s, when people would use every effect and font under the sun in a three-page powerpoint presentation. (For those of you too young to remember, the 90s were a time when decades were clearly differentiated and denim was king.)
There’s really no need to rock the boat here. Most companies get on fine using one font, such as Helvetica, only. If you have an unusual font in your logo, you might want to include that for headers. The important thing is consistency. If you use bold Times New Roman for headers and Helvetica Light for regular text, you should always use that combination.
