How to Create a Brand Style Guide for Your Business Website

A brand style guide is a document that defines how your business looks and sounds across all its communications — your website, social media, printed materials, emails and anything else that carries your name. It specifies your colours, fonts, logo usage rules, tone of voice and visual conventions so that every piece of content your business produces looks and feels coherent.

Many small business owners assume a style guide is only for large organisations with dedicated design teams. In fact, a simple one-page guide can save a small business significant time and money by reducing inconsistency, making it easier to brief freelancers, and ensuring your brand looks professional as you grow.

Colour palette and typography

Your colour palette should specify primary and secondary brand colours in hex codes (for digital use) and, if you print regularly, Pantone or CMYK equivalents. Include guidance on which colours should be used for backgrounds, headings, buttons and body text. A typical small business palette needs no more than three to five colours — any more becomes difficult to use consistently.

Typography choices should cover your heading font, body text font and any accent font you use for callouts or captions. For web use, specify the exact weight variants (for example, bold 700 for headings, regular 400 for body copy). Free tools like Google Fonts work well for web typography and make it easy to embed the same fonts across your site and any documents you produce.

Logo usage rules

Your style guide should show every version of your logo — full colour, reversed out (white on dark), and monochrome — along with the minimum size at which it can be displayed and the clear space required around it. Clear space rules prevent your logo being crowded by other elements, which makes it look smaller and less authoritative than it should.

Specify what the logo should never be used on — low-contrast backgrounds, stretched proportions, with drop shadows added, or in unapproved colour variations. These negative rules are often the most important part of logo guidance, because violations tend to happen precisely in the situations the brand owner did not anticipate.

Tone of voice and writing style

The visual elements of your brand guide matter, but so does how you write. A tone of voice section describes your brand’s personality in words: are you formal or conversational? Do you use technical language or plain English? Do you write in first person ("we") or third person? Include two or three real examples — a correct version and an incorrect version of the same sentence — to make the guidance concrete.

For website copy specifically, note your preferred approach to headlines, whether you use sentence case or title case, and any vocabulary you consistently avoid. Even a brief paragraph on voice can make a meaningful difference when you are briefing a copywriter or VA, and it ensures that content added to your website over time maintains a consistent feel.