Branding Style Guidelines: Corporate Design for Digital Signage

Branding consistency can raise your company’s revenue by 20%. Additionally, consistent branding ensures that your consumers can expect a similar impression from all your brand assets. These assets include your blog sites, website, digital signs, social media pages, and print media.

One way of ensuring branding consistency is by creating a branding style guide. Therefore, your brand style guide acts as a rulebook for anyone who makes content for your company. Read on to learn more about brand guidelines and how to use minimal design in your corporate digital signage.

What Is a Brand Style Guide?

A brand style guide outlines the policies that govern a company’s brand identity. The brand guidelines dictate the design elements, brand colors, company logo, and all branding elements used in advertising.

Benefits of a Brand Style Guide

Brand guidelines’ primary significance is ensuring brand consistency across all your platforms. Your firm’s bloggers, graphic designers, packaging managers, and web developers should deliver a cohesive brand experience. A brand style guide also benefits your firm in other ways.

Brand Recognition

Statistics indicate that a consumer needs 5 to 7 impressions to remember your brand. Therefore, you can achieve these impressions as your digital signage displays company colors and logos. Besides, using a similar color palette on your website and social media pages will create a powerful brand resonance to improve your brand recognition.

Quality Control

Your company may employ different people to manage your brand assets. A brand style guide ensures that everyone who has the task of content creation adheres to the stated brand identity. This way, you can standardize the quality of content each individual creates. Besides, you will maintain your brand integrity by eliminating branding mistakes.

Better Content Experience

Your brand guidelines ensure quality content distribution that reduces confusion among readers. Policies about font size, color use, or typography ensure that your design is easy to read and straightforward. Consequently, your reader will use less time trying to comprehend what your digital signs communicate. 

Essential Elements of a Brand Style Guide

The primary elements that your brand style guide should include are the following:

1. Brand Story

The brand story gives a narrative about your brand. The story explains what lies at the heart of your company and what it aims to achieve. Therefore, through your brand story, you create your brand identity. Moreover, when content creators understand your brand identity, it becomes easier to present it.

Your brand story can capture the following:

• Your purpose: Explain why your company exists
• Your mission: The mission statement outlines the steps you will take to achieve your goals
• Your vision: The vision describes the kind of future that your company hopes to create
• Your core values: These are the principles that govern your conduct

2. Visual Identity

Usually, people create an impression about your company based on what they see. Therefore, the visual elements of your brand are vital, especially in digital signage. These visual assets are seen inside and outside your company and solidify your brand image.

Therefore, your brand style guide must outline the policies associated with these visual graphic design elements. The visual identity portion of your style guide should cover:

The Logo

Often, consumers recognize a company by its brand logo. For instance, the apple logo that represents Apple company is on Apple devices. Indicate the shape, size, or color of your company logo. Where necessary, provide acceptable variations of your company logo that guide your designers on logo usage in different design spaces.

To avoid confusion, create a list of dos and don’ts that your graphic designers can employ as they use your brand’s logo. Additionally, provide specific logo guidelines on the logo’s background, pixel, stretching, tilting, or rotation. This way, even your content creators will know how to incorporate your logo without altering your brand identity.

Color Palette

Content creators use your business’s color scheme for your website, digital signage content, and all marketing avenues. Generally, designers follow HEX, CMYK, or RGB color codes depending on the media used. You can have a primary color palette and a secondary one.

Most businesses have three to four colors on their brand palette. Your brand guide can provide images of these colors. Also, include information about using the RGB and HEX codes to reproduce these colors for your digital media. A guide on the company’s color palette maintains a consistent look across platforms despite the color codes used.

Typography

Typography focuses on other visual elements such as font style, size, headings, alignment, and spacing. Choose a font style that’s different from the one on your logo to create contrast in your brand’s design. This way, each element can stand out. Ensure your brand book outlines the acceptable typeface to maintain brand integrity even on your digital signs.  

• Iconography

The icons you use on your brand design also present a cohesive brand image. They should be easy to understand and consistent across all platforms. For instance, the shuffle icon or repeat icon on Spotify is one that consumers are familiar with and easily understand.

3. Brand Voice

Your brand voice encompasses how you speak about your brand identity through your writings and illustrations. Your messaging, for instance, on your tagline, carries your brand voice. Consequently, how you speak can make consumers love or resent you. In fact, after the logo, visual identity, and brand colors, 25% of consumers recognize a brand by its voice.

Your brand rule book under brand voice should capture the following areas.

Brand Personality

To identify your brand personality, you first need to know your target audience. Once you know your audience, you will learn how to communicate with them. Based on your target audience, you can come across as elegant, playful, fun, caring, reliable, or joyful.

Then, you can build a personality based on the attributes you want clients to associate with your business. State your brand personality in your brand guide to help designers maintain an on-brand voice in their content.

Tone of Voice

Once you identify your brand personality, setting the tone of voice becomes easier. Your content marketers can use this tone as they create content for your digital signage display. Therefore, all marketing materials will carry the same tone, ensuring branding consistency.

Tips on How to Use Minimalistic Design for Corporate Businesses on Digital Signage

Digital signage is one way an enterprise uses minimalistic design for a corporate look. If the minimalistic design is in your branding strategies, ensure you communicate this through your brand style guidelines.

Here are ways you can use minimalistic design in digital signage.

1. Identify the Main Idea That You Want to Communicate. Focus on it and avoid unnecessary details. However, minimalism doesn’t mean a flat design.
2. Choose a Simple Color Palette. Use fewer colors that communicate your brand’s personality. Also, take time to learn about color psychology and how colors can create an emotional attachment to your brand. As your clients view your digital sign displays with brand colors, they learn to associate them with your firm.
3. Use Fonts Sparingly. Choose two fonts for your logo and a maximum of three font styles for your website. Additionally, use sleeker fonts instead of heavy ones for your minimal design. You can use the contrast between your font color and background for the headline and add appeal to important information.
4. Opt for a Solid Calm Background. A calm background highlights your text and images. Therefore, your messaging stands out, and readers easily read your digital signs. For instance, minimalistic designs on digital kiosks and hallway signage content reduce delays during navigation in your building.
5. Ensure Visual Hierarchy. Make sure you present your information in order from the most important one. Display the main message boldly so it draws your reader’s attention. Besides, minimal design should be purposeful to ensure readers get all the main points.

Minimal corporate design can ensure you maintain an elegant enterprise look for your small business through your digital signs.

Branding Style Guide Templates

You need a brand guide if you’re a business that desires a minimal corporate design for digital signage. For inspiration, look at style guide examples from the best brands like Netflix, LinkedIn, Spotify, or Skype. These companies have strong brand images that can help create your own brand rulebook.

You can use a brand style guide to employ minimalistic design in your digital signage. Moreover, the guideline will ensure all content creators use minimalism appropriately in their content. This way, you can fulfill your brand needs while meeting your minimalism goals.