A small business brand style guide needs seven things: your logo versions, the rules for using them, exact colour values, typefaces, an imagery style, a page on voice, and examples of the brand in use. Add a one-page cheat sheet and keep the whole thing under ten pages.
The most common style guide we see is the opposite: a beautiful 40 page PDF that nobody has opened since the day it was delivered. Meanwhile the Facebook posts are in a different font and the new sign is the wrong blue.
A style guide has one job: to let someone who has never met you produce something that looks like it came from your business. That someone might be a sign writer, a printer, a web developer, a new staff member, or you at 9pm doing a flyer in Canva. Write it for them.
The sections that matter
You don’t need all of these at equal length. For most small businesses, the logo and colour pages do most of the work.
1. Logo versions
Show every approved version of the logo and say when to use each one:
- Primary: the full logo, used wherever there’s room
- Horizontal or stacked alternative: for wide spaces like website headers or narrow ones like a shirt pocket
- Icon or monogram: for social profile pictures, browser icons and embroidery
- One colour, reversed (white) and black: for dark backgrounds, single colour printing and newspaper ads
Next to each, list the file names so people can find the right one. “Use logo-horizontal-reversed.svg on dark backgrounds” is more useful than any amount of explanation. If file types confuse people, link them to a plain guide such as our logo file formats explainer.
2. Logo rules
Two things belong here: clear space and minimum size.
Clear space is the empty area around the logo that nothing else can enter. Define it with something in the logo itself so it scales: “Keep clear space equal to the height of the letter N on all sides.”
Minimum size stops people shrinking it until it turns to mush: “Don’t use the full logo smaller than 30 mm wide in print or 120 pixels on screen. Below that, use the icon.”
Then a page of misuse examples, shown visually with a cross through them. In practice the same mistakes come up again and again:
- stretched or squashed
- recoloured to match something else
- placed on a busy photo with no contrast
- drop shadows, outlines or glows added
- the tagline retyped in a different font
- the icon rearranged or used next to the full logo
Pictures work much better here than words. People skim text but notice a squashed logo with a red cross over it.
3. Colours
List every brand colour with all its values in one place:
- HEX for websites and Canva (for example
#1F4E5A) - RGB for screen work
- CMYK for standard print
- Pantone if you use spot colour on signage, uniforms or packaging
Then say how much of each to use. A palette without proportions gets used evenly, and everything turns into a rainbow. Something like “Navy is our main colour. Sand is for backgrounds. Coral is for buttons and highlights only, never large areas.”
Include which text colours are safe on which backgrounds, so people don’t put white text on your pale yellow. We go into building a palette that works in print and on screen in choosing brand colours that work everywhere.
4. Typography
Name the typefaces, where to get them, and what each is for. Usually that’s two: one for headings and one for body text.
Add a fallback. Your designer may have used a licensed font that isn’t in Canva or Microsoft Word, so tell people what to use instead: “If Söhne isn’t available, use Inter for headings and body.” Without that line, staff will pick their own.
A small sample hierarchy helps: heading size, subheading, body, and caption, shown in place.
5. Imagery
This is the section most often left out, and it’s often the biggest reason a brand looks inconsistent.
Describe the style of photography in a few plain sentences and show six to ten examples. For example: “Real people on real jobs. Natural light. No posed handshakes, no stock photos of people pointing at laptops. Show hands, tools and finished work.” If you’ve had a proper shoot done, the guide should show those images and say where the full library lives.
Also cover icons and illustration if you use them: line or solid, rounded or square, one colour or two.
6. Voice
One page is plenty. Describe how the business sounds in three or four “this, not that” pairs, and show one example sentence rewritten in your voice:
Instead of: “We are committed to delivering high quality solutions to our valued clients.”
We’d say: “We turn up when we say we will, and we clean up before we leave.”
Add a short list of words you use and words you avoid, plus how you write your name (is it “The Design Space” or “Design Space”? Capital T?). Those small details are exactly what people get wrong.
7. Applications
Show the brand in use: business card, email signature, social post template, a sign, a vehicle, a uniform, a letterhead or quote template. These pages answer the question “what’s this meant to look like?” faster than any rule. If those templates don’t exist yet, building them is everyday graphic design work and worth doing alongside the guide.
How to make one people use
Keep the core under ten pages. If you need more for packaging or signage specs, put it in an appendix. A sole trader can get away with four pages.
Make a one-page cheat sheet. Logo versions, colour codes, fonts and the three most important rules on a single page. This is the bit people print and stick on the wall, or forward to the printer.
Put the files next to the guide. Make a single shared folder with the guide, all logo files, fonts (where the licence allows) and approved photos, named so a stranger can find things. A guide that says “use the reversed logo” without a link to it creates an email asking for the reversed logo.
Send it with every brief. Make it part of how you work with suppliers. When you order signs or uniforms, attach the cheat sheet.
Load it into the tools people use. Add the brand colours and fonts to your Canva Brand Kit if you have one, set them as global styles on the website, and save an email signature everyone can copy. Defaults beat rules.
Name an owner. Someone in the business decides when things are off-brand. Without that person, the guide slowly becomes optional.
Update it. When you add a new service, new photos or a new template, add it to the guide. Date the front page so people know if they have the current version.
A minimum version if you’re starting small
If you can’t justify a full guide yet, ask your designer for this at the end of your logo project:
- every logo version with file names
- clear space and minimum size
- colour values (HEX, RGB, CMYK) and a rough ratio of use
- two typefaces with fallbacks
- five do’s and don’ts, shown visually
That’s a few pages, and it will save you from the slow drift that makes most small brands look homemade after a couple of years.
Whoever does your logo, make the style guide part of the brief from day one; our branding and logo design page shows how we approach it. The imagery section is much stronger with a library of your own photos, which is where our commercial photography usually comes in.