Brand Style Guidelines for Personal Brands | Ep. 190

Today we’re talking about your personal brand style guideline. Learn the elements that should go into your personal brand style guide, and how to create one. Brand guidelines are the very beginning branding elements of your business and include 5 key elements…

Logo
Typography
Color Palette
Professional Photography
Brand Voice

Let’s dive in!

WHAT ARE BRAND STYLE GUIDELINES?

They typically include three things. One is your logo and how that logo looks in different colors, the size, and what it looks like black and white, with the background. All the logo design stuff goes into what they call a brand guideline, which is like a book that describes your branding elements.

The logo is usually the first piece that gets laid out as well as the usage of that logo, which is the spacing that the logo can have against other things. If they’re going to place your logo on a website, how close can it be to other things on the website? If it’s going in a magazine, how close can it be to other things in the magazine? What’s the shape and then the spacing of it versus other things?

5 ELEMENTS OF STYLE GUIDELINES

When you’re building your guidelines, typically you’ll outline that and show what the spacing requirements are for your logo. That’s part one. The other two elements are your font or typography, and then your color palette.

Those are the standard things that go into brand guidelines. That’s your logo, your typography, and your color palette.

I would suggest that for a personal brand, you also add these two elements to it. Professional photos and the usage of those, as well as your brand voice, which we’ll talk about. Those are five personal branding elements that are going to go into your personal branding guidelines. I’ll say them again: your logo, your typography, your color palette, professional photos, and your brand voice.

HOW TO BEGIN YOUR BRAND STYLE GUIDELINES

We talked about the logo a little bit. If you’re a personal brand, as I’ve suggested in other lessons, I think a signature is great. You can design that however, you want. Beyond your logo, the typography or the font you use is a choice you have to make.

What you want to know if you have words in your logo, what is that font supposed to be? What size is it? Is it bold or not bold? What is the font you’re choosing?

There are some standard fonts out there. You can Google “popular logo fonts”, and all of them will pop up. There are some that have just traditionally been the ones that are most recognized and easiest to use, but go and pick a couple that really work for you, things that are classic that will stand the test of time.

BEST WAY TO PICK YOUR COLOR PALETTE

After you pick your font and typography, the next thing you’re going to pick is your color palette. These are the colors you’re going to use that are in your logo, but also the colors that will end up in your website design, and also in social media templates and graphics. That could be anywhere from three to five colors, which is pretty standard, or more like eight, nine, or ten colors.

The idea is that those colors work together in a visual way that Is tasteful and works together. That can be a lot of work for some people to figure that out. There are ways to get around that other than hiring someone. What I would suggest is this great website called coolers.co. What that allows you to do is build a template. It will randomly assign colors and you just keep flipping through the templates until you find one set of colors that you like.

Some of them will be all related. It will be a bunch of red colors together in different shades. Some will show colors of an opposite spectrum. It will be reds all the way to blues and those work together based on what they picked.

USE YOUR STYLE GUIDELINES TO HIRE HELP

What is great is it’s already picked for you, and you just pick one that you think aligns with how you want your brand to look and feel. You can pick those colors, you pick those logos, you pick those fonts that typically can be done for you. Go to a site like Upwork and find a freelancer to design that, to lay it out in a pretty PDF that you can hand to anyone that works with you and say, “This is my brand guidelines.”

You can also go to a site like 99designs.com. For up to $500, your designer will build you a logo. You can choose from all different logo options and different designers. Once you choose a logo you like the best and make modifications, they then fill in the rest of those guidelines with the font, the typography, and the color palette based on colors that you’ve given input to.

Sometimes they get to that style by asking you what are some logos that you like. “Here are some examples, which logos do you like the look of? Which colors do you like? What color sets, do you like?” This will help you go through that.

What’s great is if you go to a site like 99designs, you can use their tool and not end up going through the process. Use the tool to pick the types and fields of logos and colors that you like right there on the website. Download this to your own computer and share them, or just use them to design your own things yourself.

YOU CAN DO THE WORK YOURSELF

I’m trying to save you guys money because I think a lot of this is completely overrated and overpriced for what you guys need to do. If you can just go to a simple site like Canva, build your own logo just as a letter and a couple of words, pick your font that’s popular, and then choose a color palette that feels right from Coolers.co, then you’re off to the races.

That should take you half an hour or less to get all that stuff done as long as you have a feel for what you want. Get those things done and you can put them in a place that’s shareable to others.

BRAND GUIDELINES FOR PHOTOS AND VOICE

I would add two things to this list. One is professional photos. If you’re a personal brand, what’s different from you and a business is that you are the brand and you need to be the face of it. Get out there and get pictures taken by a professional photographer in different environments. Find both lifestyle environments, (walking around in certain buildings and backgrounds that feel right to you,) and professional environments that reflect what you do for a living.

This is important so that you can have those photos not only for your professional website, which has to feature you on it but also for social media and other opportunities. For example, things like your biography that you need for guesting and for PR that you’re going to have at your disposal that you can just send off.

RELATED: Build your personal brand with the Content Marketing Starter Guide.

GUIDELINES PROTECT YOUR PERSONAL PHOTOS

You’ll have usage for that as well. You can say, “Here are the photos you can use. Don’t crop them, take out the background, or superimpose me next to someone else.” Or you can say, “Yes, that’s fine.” It’s up to you, but you defining it is going to save you a lot of heartache at the end of the day.

Make sure you get some professional photos so you’re not scrambling at the end of the day. I think everyone should get professional photos done every year if they can. If you get a photographer in the neighborhood, it’s usually a couple of hundred dollars to get that.

DEFINE GUIDELINES FOR YOUR BRAND VOICE

Last I would say is brand voice. This is a little bit trickier one, but basically, if I had to make that simple, you want this to tie to your personality. When you are having other people that work with you to edit your content (in terms of what you’re writing and what you’re saying,) what you want is some do’s and don’ts.

You want to say, “These are words that I like and words that I don’t like. If you come across these, make sure to get rid of them or replace them in some way, shape, or form.” An example is if I’m talking about someone who has a lot of followers, one person might call them an influencer. That’s not a word that I like to use.

I like to talk about a personal brand instead of an influencer. That personal brand may have a following, but that’s not a word I like to use because it’s a different connotation that talks about people that are building fame and entertainment.

BRAND GUIDELINES HELP WITH OUTSOURCING

That’s different than what we’re talking about when I’m talking about personal branding. You can have that built into your guidelines. This is the voice of the brand. This is what we talk about when we’re referring to different types of things. You can just continue to add rules to it as you go.

That way as you build people onto your team where you’re working with freelancers or you’re outsourcing work, you have some guidelines that you can refer to that says, “This is how to work with me in terms of the words and the content editing, as well as the visuals,” (which has all the stuff we talked about before that).

When you’re building personal brand style guidelines, these are the elements that I think are important for our personal brand. I hope that was helpful for you guys.

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