10 most beautiful Brand Books/Style Guides

Inspiration for creating your own brand guidelines

How do you keep everybody in your organization using your brand consistently? A Brand Book and a Brand Style Guide are similar documents that can both be key tools for brand management. What are some examples of great Brand Books and Style Guides that you can use for inspiration?

The brand of your organization is ideally built from the ground up from the Purpose or core idea of your organization, with the visual or tangible elements as a prime identifier for it. The brand of your organization can be thought of as making itself tangible through four vectors: Product, (Physical or Digital) Environment, Communication and Behavior.  

• A Brand Book inspires and helps keep people in your organization aligned with the Purpose or core idea of your organization, and helps them think, communicate and act from that Purpose as a starting point.  
• A Brand Style Guide helps the people inside and outside of your organization who use your visual brand assets, to use them consistently and correctly.  

As you can see, a Brand Book is geared more to meaning and inspiration, while a Style Guide is geared mainly toward maintaining visual Brand Consistency. 

In short:

• Determine your brand’s identity and produce your Brand Style Guide;
• Make your brand guidelines accessible to your partners and colleagues;
• Allow your colleagues access to all imagery (photos, illustrations, videos) that are property to the brand;
• Always communicate on brand;
• Provide templates for your posts on Social Media, (sales) presentations;
• Become recognizable and build an authentic brand.

The 10 most beautiful Brand Books/Style Guides

Are you looking for inspiration for your brand book? There are plenty of companies that have published their brand books online.

Lytho also has you covered with a free whitepaper so you can get started with creating your very own brand style guide.

Here is a selection of our favourite brand books and style guides:

1. Love to Ride

Love to Ride is an online bicycle community with a mission to encourage people to bike. Their brand book is colourful and doesn't contain much text.

2. Red Cross

Red Cross keeps it short and simple. This brand poster tells you everything you need to know about Red Cross brand guidelines in a PDF.

3. *Santa*

Although *Santa* is not an actual brand, *Santa*’s brand book is a clever example of keeping things playful and very visual. If it suits your brand, why not? This brand book is an initiative by Quietroom.

4. Coca Cola

Coca-Cola’s brand book beautifully displays what associations and emotions their brand should evoke in their consumers. You don't have to say a lot to emit a strong message.

5. I Love NY

Urban and stylish. These two words sum up  I Love NY's brand book.

6. Macaroni Grill Brand Book

This attractive and illustrative brand book has a warm, Italian feel to it. Macaroni Grill uses the word "crave" as an acronym and choses keywords that fit the brand.

7. Scrimshaw Coffee

A little pinch of retro. Scrimshaw Coffees brand book.

8. Google

Clean and clear. That's how Google presents their brand. Check out their brand style guide.

9. Bacardi

The Bacardi brand book is one of our personal favorites. It breathes the Cuban vibe and has a nostalgic feel to it. See their brand book on Here Design.

10. Mailchimp

Mailchimp has a special link uniquely describing the tone of voice of the company.