Creating a Style Guide

Before we officially begin our projects, Hailey and I need to create a Style Guide. HUHHH What's a style guide? That's exactly what I thought when I was first introduced the idea by my teacher. But apparently a style guide is necessary since Hailey and I are working together.

By definition, a style guide is a "holistic set of standards that defines your company’s branding. It references grammar, tone, logo usage, colors, visuals, word usage, point of view, and more." The purpose of a style guide is to ensure that both of us have the same conventions for our magazine since we are technically working on magazines under the same branch. Creating a style guide also ensures a recognizable voice for your audience.

So, what is included in a style? Well a lot of things, and figuring out what to include in our style guide is probably the most difficult part of this for me. According to GatherContent, a style guide should be 4 to 5 pages long. A style guide includes many things, such as:

A mission statement - explaining name and tagline
A table of contents
A writing section

Baseline guide: using the oxford comma, spelling of certain words, using symbols, etc)
Formatting: how to use bullets, lists, hyphens, quotes
Tone and voice: sentence structures, tones, etc
Additional: words to engage, words to avoid

A visual section

Formats: infographics, videos, etc.
Colors: color palette (primary and secondary colors) including HEX, CMYK, and RGB codes and Pantone number
Logo/Masthead: improper uses, where to use
Fonts: for mastheads, paragraphs, quotes
Typography: font size, weight, spacing,

So with this knowledge, Hailey and I began creating our style guide. We heavily used the Vogue style guide as inspiration.

We started with our visual aspects like our logo and color palette. Our main colors are black and white, and then we also have a muted red and blue as our primary colors as well. For secondary colors, I chose different variants of grays, red, and blue. Then, we worked on our typography. This part was a bit difficult because we had to include the different variants of our chosen fonts such as the bold and light versions. Then, we began to work on the hardest part, for us at least. This was the Font Styles. Here we had to choose what font and color combination would be used for different headers and such. This took maybe 1 hour or so to do, but at least we don't have to think about that when we are actually making our product.

The next thing we did was our writing aspects. We decided to use the oxford comma because not using the oxford comma makes things confusing. I also added some other things, but I didn't add too many restrictions. I also added an explanation as to why some of these choices were made.

Other style guides tend to have even more information such as mission statements; however, our style guide doesn't require those because we are creating a magazine and not a business in it's entirety. Our style guide is also shorter because a majority of a magazine's style guide consists of different fonts used throughout the magazine. Since we are only doing 3 elements of a magazine, we do not have a need for an excess amount of fonts.

Our next step is to obviously post the style guide. After that, I believe it's time to get started on the product itself. The product is due in 3 weeks, and Hailey will be on a school trip for Theatre in that last week, so we must get everything done in these upcoming 2 weeks. There is no more time for planning. It's time to get to it.

Thanks so much for tuning in, catch you later!

Resources:

https://www.figma.com/resource-library/what-is-a-style-guide/#_5-key-elements-of-a-brand-style-guide

https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/articles/how-to-brand-style-guide/

https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/business/teams/resources/how-to/brand-guide.html

https://bradfrost.github.io/cn-style-guide/styles/vogue.html

https://writer.com/guides/style-guide/