Friday, January 14, 2022

21 Brand Style Guide Examples for Visual Inspiration

When it comes to building a memorable brand, it's all about consistency. Like when you're shopping for your favorite cereal or coffee at the grocery store, you want to be able to spot it from a mile away.

The best brands stick in our brains because their presence is defined by the repetition of the same logo, fonts, colors, and images. Once we see them enough, they become instantly recognizable, bringing us a clear sense of reliability and security.

Free Download: How to Create a Style Guide [+ Free Templates]

Developing a consistent brand starts with creating a brand style guide. These branding rule books help graphic designers, marketers, web developers, community managers, and even product packaging departments all stay on the same page, and present a unified vision of the brand to the public.

In this article, we’ll go over what brand guidelines are, elements of a style guide, and some amazing examples of them in action to use as inspiration for your next branding project or website redesign.

What are brand guidelines?

Brand guidelines, also known as a brand style guide, govern the composition, design, and general look-and-feel of a company's branding. Brand guidelines can dictate the content of a logo, blog, website, advertisement, and similar marketing collateral.

Picture the most recognizable brands you can think of. Chances are, you've learned to recognize them because of the consistency across the messaging — written or visual — these brands broadcast. The same brand colors are reflected across them. The language sounds familiar. It's all very organized and, while not rigid, it's cohesive.

Here are a few types of guidelines you'd find in a brand style guide and which parts of a brand they can influence.

Download our free resource on how to create your own style guide with brand guidelines templates to follow. Creating a consistent style guide isn’t easy, but with these tools you can build an unforgettable one with ease.

The Elements of a Brand Style Guide

A brand style guide encompasses much more than just a logo. It visually encompasses everything your brand is about — down to your business’ purpose. Here are some key elements that make or break a brand style guide.

  • Mission Statement: Your mission statement is the compass of your brand style guide. It ensures that all your content is working toward the same goal. This statement can guide your blog and paid content, ad copy, visual media and slogan.
  • Buyer Persona: A buyer persona is the fictional representation of your ideal customer. It includes details on your customer’s job title, age, gender and professional challenges — therefore stipulating for whom your brand publishes content. Your buyer persona guides you blog content, ad copy, and visual media.
  • Color Palette: Your color palette is a group of colors your company uses to design its brand, guiding every piece of visual content created. These color combinations often follow HEX or RGB color codes, and govern your logo, web design, printed ads and event collateral.
  • Editorial Style Guide: The job of an editorial style guide is to commit an editorial stylebook on how to phrase certain products, list topics the brand can and cannot write about, and other companies it can mention. Your editorial style guide can guide your blog content, video scripts, website and landing page copy, PR talking points and knowledge base articles.
  • Typography: Typography is a visual element of your brand style guide that goes beyond the font you use in your company logo. It supports your blog design down to the links and copy on your website — even your tagline.

As you can see, the purpose of the brand style guide is to form and maintain all of the various elements of a company that, when combined, spell out the entire brand as it's recognized.

Intrigued? Check out 21 of the best ones we could find.

1. Medium

Medium emphasizes both typography and color in its brand style guide. Its guide also includes details related to the company's "Purpose" and "Product Principles."

See the full brand guide here.

Brand style guide from Medium, featuring a white, black, and green color palette.

Medium brand style guide typohgraphy

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2. Wolf Circus Jewelry

Wolf Circus Jewelry's product is all about appearance. Naturally, the company's style guide is too. The brand's style guide includes the company's mission statement, product details, typeface, logo variations, a color palette, and a separate set of guidelines just for advertisements.

See the full brand guide here.

Logo variations for Wolf Circus Jewelry

wolf circus jewelry color palette

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3. Ollo

Ollo is so into color and typography, it turned its style guide into a game. Click the link below to see how much you can manipulate the brand. It's the perfect way to show content creators how creative they can get but also still adhere to Ollo's specific typeface and color codes.

See the full brand guide here.

Ollo brand style guide color palette

ollo brand style guide typography

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4. Skype

Everyone's favorite video chat platform also has a squeaky-clean style guide for its brand. Skype, now owned by Microsoft, focuses primarily on its product phrasing and logo placement.

See the full brand guide here.

skype brand style guide logo and icon usage

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5. Barre & Soul

Barre & Soul's brand style guide includes variations of its logo, logo spacing, secondary logos, supporting imagery, and a five-color color palette.

See the full brand guide here.

barre & soul brand style guide

barre & soul brand style guide logo imagery and color palette

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6. Spotify

Spotify's style guide might appear simple and green, but there's more to the brand than just a lime green circle. Spotify's color palette includes three color codes, while the rest of the company's branding guidelines focus heavily on logo variation and album artwork. The style guide even allows you to download an icon version of its logo, making it easier to represent the company without manually recreating it.

See the full brand guide here.

spotify brand style guidelines logos and color palette

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7. Jamie Oliver

Jamie Oliver has an extremely thorough brand style guide, covering logo placement across all of its kitchenware products. The company also includes a large color palette with each color sorted by the product it should be shown on.

See the full brand guide here.

Brand style guide for Jamie Oliver with red tiled images showing photography restrictions

Typography guidelines for Jamie Oliver

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8. Herban Kitchen

Herban Kitchen has both a color and texture palette in its style guide. These guidelines help to show not just how the brand's logo will appear, but how the company's various storefronts will look from the outside to potential customers.

See the full brand guide here.

Brand style guide for Herban Kitchen with eight logo variations and six color code tiles

herban kitchen brand style guide

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9. Urban Outfitters

Photography, color, and even tone of voice appear in Urban Outfitters' California-inspired brand guidelines. However, the company isn't shy to include information about its ideal consumer and what the brand believes in, as well.

See the full brand guide here.

Brand style guide for Urban Outfitters with black and white logo variations

urban outfitters brand style guide

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10. Love to Ride

Love to Ride, a cycling company, is all about color variety in its visually pleasing style guide. The company's brand guidelines include nine color codes and tons of detail about its secondary logos and imagery.

See the full brand guide here.

Color palette for Love to Ride with nine cool colors in circular icons

Infographic guidelines for Love to Ride

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11. Barbican

Barbican, an art and learning center in the United Kingdom, sports a loud yet simple style guide focusing heavily on its logo and supporting typefaces.

See the full brand guide here.

barbican brand style guide logo format

Typography guidelines in the style guide of Barbican art and learning centre

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12. I Love New York

Despite its famously simple t-shirts, I Love New York has a brand style guide. The company begins its guidelines with a thorough explanation of its mission, vision, story, target audience, and tone of voice. Only then does the style guide delve into its logo positioning on various merchandise.

See the full brand guide here.

Brand style guide for I Love New York with logo and gridlines

i love new york brand style guide typography

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13. Cisco

Cisco's style guide isn't just a guide — it's an interactive brand book. The company takes website visitors page by page through its brand's vision, mission, strategy, and even its promise before showing users their logo and allowing them to actually type using their proprietary typeface, "CiscoSans." Where's Cisco's color palette, you ask? The business has a separate webpage for just that.

See the full brand guide here.

cisco brand style guide book

cisco brand style guide sans typography

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14. University of the Arts Helsinki

The style guide of the University of the Arts Helsinki is more of a creative branding album than a traditional marketing guide. It shows you dozens of contexts in which you'd see this school's provocative logo, including animations.

See the full brand guide here.

university of the arts helsinki brand style guide typography

university of the arts helsinki brand style guide

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15. NJORD

NJORD's minimalist style guide gives you everything you'd need to know to design using the brand's logo and color palette for both web and print.

See the full brand guide here.

Brand style guide for NJORD with black and white logo and color palette

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16. Espacio Cultural

This cultural center in Argentina has a color palette that's as elaborate as the artistic workshops it hosts. Nonetheless, the brand does a fantastic job of breaking down every last color code and logo placement you can find — from the building itself to the advertisements promoting it.

See the full brand guide here.

espacio cultural brand style guide

espacio cultural brand style guide

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17. Alienware

Video gamers know Alienware from its game-friendly computers, but the rest of the world knows it by the brand's sleek aesthetic. The company organizes its brand style guide into four basic parts: voice, design, photography, and partner. The latter describes (and shows) how the brand interacts with partner brands, such as Star Wars.

See the full brand guide here.

Brand style guide and color palette for Alienware

alienware brand style guide sleek aesthetic

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18. Netflix

As far as its public brand assets are concerned, Netflix is focused primarily on the treatment of its logo. The company offers a simple set of rules governing the size, spacing, and placement of its famous capitalized typeface, as well as a single color code for its classic red logo.

See the full brand guide here.

netflix brand style guide logo

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19. Scrimshaw Coffee

Featuring a five-code color palette, this "laid back," "friendly," and "modern" brand has a number of secondary logos it embraces in various situations.

See the full brand guide here.

scrimshaw coffee brand style guide color palette and logos

scrimshaw coffee brand style guide

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20. NASA

NASA's "Graphics Standards Manual" is as official and complex as you think it is. At 220 pages, the guide describes countless logo placements, color uses, and supporting designs. And yes, NASA's space shuttles have their own branding rules.

See the full brand guide here.

The NASA Graphics Standards Manual white cover sheet brand style guide

Red color palette of the NASA brand style guide

nasa brand style guide typography

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21. New York City Transit Authority

Like NASA, the NYCTA has its own Graphics Standards Manual, and it includes some fascinating typography rules for the numbers, arrows, and public transit symbols the average commuter takes for granted every day.

See the full brand guide here.

nycta brand style guide typography

nycta brand style guidelines

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Build a Memorable Style Guide of Your Own

Once you build your unique brand style guide, customers will recognize your brand and associate it with all the visual cues you want them to. We hope you were inspired by our list of amazing brand style guides and wish you luck in creating a timeless style of your own.


21 Brand Style Guide Examples for Visual Inspiration was originally posted by Local Sign Company Irvine, Ca. https://goo.gl/4NmUQV https://goo.gl/bQ1zHR http://www.pearltrees.com/anaheimsigns

Thursday, January 13, 2022

19 Great Landing Page Examples You'll Want to Copy in 2022

While many landing pages look different and use a variety of exciting strategies to pull in audiences, they all serve one major purpose — to convert to the next stage in the buyer's journey.

Free Guide: How to Build & Optimize Landing Pages

Rather than serving as a basic advertisement that shows a customer a product, a landing page aims to engage and delight a customer by offering them something that relates to the product or the company's industry. When they fill out the form and receive a reward of interesting content, they might be even more likely to trust your brand and become a customer.

Quick tip: Want an easy way to add a form to your landing page? HubSpot’s free form builder tool can help you fill your CRM with leads from your website.

Let’s talk through an example of when a landing page can be especially effective. If a business wants to sell an AI product that helps salespeople, they might create a landing page that offers audiences a free video on how to use AI in the sales industry. Interested audiences might offer their contact information in exchange for the valuable information. If they enjoy the video they've received, they might be more likely to respond to or purchase a product from a company rep who calls them.

In another scenario, a publishing company that targets an audience of chief executives might create a landing page that invites audiences to sign up for a webinar hosted by an executive at a major company.

After giving their email address on the signup form presented on the landing page, the leads get an email with the webinar dates and log in information, as well as instructions on how to sign up for the publication's newsletter or subscription. If the user is pleased by the webinar, they might sign up for the newsletter or a subscription to keep up with similar publication content.

Although their purpose is simple enough in theory, actually designing a successful landing page requires some detailed planning and creative testing.

Even after launching your landing page, you'll want to pay attention to conversion rates to see how well it's doing.

To determine your conversion rate, simply divide the number of conversions a web page generates by the number of people who visited that page.

If your conversion rate isn't close to the average just yet, don't worry. Nailing those percentages can be a bit challenging at first, especially if you have a lot of regular page visitors. Luckily, there are a number of simple conversion rate optimization strategies that can help you boost your current rate quickly.

Regardless of what your business is selling or the conversion action you hope to instigate, it's helpful to get inspired by seeing what other great landing pages look like.

And because there's no one "right" way of designing a landing page, you'll want to check out examples from lots of different industries for different stages of the buying process.

Want to get inspired? Check out the great landing page examples below.

We don't have access to the analytics for each of these landing pages, so I can't tell you specifically how well they convert visitors, contacts, leads, and customers. But many of them do follow best practices while also implementing a few new experiments that could give you ideas for your own landing pages.

19 Great Examples of Landing Page Design

1. AirBnB

This AirBnB landing page is a one-stop shop for visitors curious about hosting. It features testimonials from current hosts, articles offering advice, and even a calculator to estimate your weekly average earnings based on your location.

If all this info convinces you to start hosting, the vibrant pink CTA in the header makes it easy to convert on the spot.

2. Wix

Wix has turned its landing page into a creative playground with a stunning and captivating digital illustration that follows you down the page. It's not overwhelming or distracting — it's carefully balanced with white space and clear text.

We love the use of design to emphasize certain touchpoints on the page. For instance, the mountain's peak in the illustration points to the main CTA encouraging visitors to get started.

3. ExpressVPN

What do we love most about this landing page? It's not what it has, but what it doesn't — a navigation bar! By removing the navigation bar, ExpressVPN shines a spotlight on the primary CTA.

Why do we take an anti-navigation stance for landing pages? They tend to distract visitors and lead them away from the intended action. Not only is this a landing page design best practice, but we've also conducted A/B tests that show removing navigation links from landing pages increases conversion rates.

4. Row House

Besides its sleek design, this landing page gets bonus points for the autoplay video in the background, which adds a degree of movement to an otherwise static page. Speaking of movement, the video shows people working out at Row House, which offers a great introduction to the brand.

If it suits your brand, try enticing visitors with a video component. It could be the difference between passive and active engagement.

5. Codeacademy

I like this page because it's simple in both copy and design. The form on the page is simple and only requires an email address and password. Or, you can use your LinkedIn, Facebook, GitHub, or Google Plus login, shortening the conversion path even further.

The landing page also offers real-life success stories, testimonials, and other forms of social proof for visitors who need more information before creating an account. This helps make the potentially intimidating world of coding more approachable for beginners.

6. Sunbasket

Sunbasket takes a competitive approach to its landing page, directly comparing its meal delivery service to its main competitor, Blue Apron. As you scroll down the page, a table highlights where Sunbasket's features exceed those of Blue Apron.

By comparing your products or services to another, you can highlight why yours is the clear winner. It's a smart way to provide "evidence" to potential customers as to why they should choose you.

7. Curology

I'd argue that the top fold is the most important element of a landing page, alongside the CTA. Curology's top fold is clean, visually appealing, and to-the-point — and the copy is less than 50 characters long. Users immediately understand the offer and how it can benefit them.

Even if the brand is new to you, its message is loud and clear — regardless of your skin issues, Curology has a custom solution for you.

8. Breather

Here's another example of clever, delightful design on a landing page. As soon as you visit Breather.com, there's an instant call to action: indicate where you want to find a space. Plus, it uses location services to figure out where you are, providing instant options nearby.

We love how Breather used simple, to-the-point copy to let the visitor know what the company does, followed immediately by the CTA to select a city. The negative space and soothing color scheme also align with the product –– essentially, room to breathe.

9. Mailchimp

For starters, check out that sunny yellow background color — it's impossible to ignore. It's a bold departure from its more subdued home page, yet still on brand.

Besides the color, this landing page gets a shoutout for its CTA placement. It displays a consistent CTA ("Sign Up") not once or twice, but three times on the page. No matter how far down you scroll, you will see the same button.

This is a solid strategy since the CTA operates as a gateway for converting clients. It should be available to visitors as they move down the page — not just once on the top fold.

10. Paramount Plus

This landing page design has it all. It's visually appealing, interactive, and offers scannable yet descriptive headers – such as Peak Streaming, Peak Originals, and Peak Family Team. Plus, the background makes each fold look slightly different, creating a captivating scrolling experience.

The landing page also features a repeatable CTA ("Try It Free") and several strategically-placed content offers, culminating in multiple touchpoints for visitors to convert.

11. CarMax

CarMax is ready to empower visitors to do their own research right on the landing page. It features a search bar that leads to a large database of cars and a calculator that allows visitors to estimate their ideal monthly budget.

For those looking to sell their car, it also includes a form that users can fill out to receive a quote.

It's clear CarMax wants the buying or selling experience to be as painless as possible. By translating the company's customer-centric approach on its landing page, CarMax effectively turns a universally dreaded event — purchasing a new car — into a straightforward process without gimmicks or barriers.

12. Edupath

Who is your landing page's target audience? While most of Edupath's website content is directed toward students, there are sections dedicated to advising parents on helping their teenagers through college applications and SAT preparation. The landing page below is in one of these sections.

When parents fill out their teenager's name, email address, and mobile number, a link to download the Edupath app is sent directly to them. The folks at Edupath know students are likely to do something if their parents ask them to — especially if it means they don't have to surrender their phones.

Plus, it's an easy, one-click process. This whole conversion path is a clever and helpful way to get the apps on more students' phones by way of their parents.

13. Startup Institute

Visitors to your website won't hand over their personal information without knowing what they're going to get in return. On its landing page, Startup Institute makes abundantly clear what will happen after you apply by listing a Q&A right beside the form. It might prompt some people to say, "They read my mind!"

To avoid hesitancy to fill out a form, use your landing page to set expectations upfront. That clears the air, and can also weed out the people who don't take your content, product or service seriously.

Simple Landing Pages

14. Uber

People are flooded with information online. This is why creating a skim-able landing page is essential — like this one from Uber.

It features a black and white color scheme, short and easily-digestible sentences, and a simple form. The combination of these elements results in a professional and approachable page.

15. Spotify

This landing page takes a dramatic detour from Spotify's classic green and black colors — and perhaps that's the point. It could be a way to signal to visitors that the page serves a different purpose from its other content.

Even though the landing page is relatively simple, the stark color contrast emphasizes the text and CTAs. To entice visitors even more, it lists the most played artist, song, album, and podcast of the year —all of which are available on Spotify. It's a creative way to promote its content library while attracting visitors to sign up.

16. Canva

Sometimes you need to admire a landing page for its attractive and straightforward design. Similar to the example above, this one features an abundance of white space that accentuates the text and balances the bright colors throughout.

To seal it off, the page ends with a FAQ section. If you suspect visitors will have additional questions about your products or services, you may want to include a similar section too. It lets potential customers better understand what you’re trying to sell them, and sends a message that you're open to questions.

Product Landing Pages

17. Mooala

Playful isn't usually the first word that comes to mind when you think of dairy-free milk, but Mooala's bright and colorful landing page is exactly that.

This example illustrates how you can embrace simplicity while using relatively bold striking colors — like neon green — to highlight important headers and CTAs. To pull this off, stick with colors that correspond with your brand while also capturing the attention of visitors.

18. Nauto

When writing website copy for a product or service, a helpful rule of thumb is to expand on the benefits rather than the features. Such advice also applies to writing landing pages.

For example, instead of bombarding visitors with technical information, Nauto, a fleet safety platform, chooses to highlight its benefits with clear and engaging copy ("Your roadmap for fleet safety"). In doing so, Nauto makes its content offer more appealing.

19. Rover

Putting your pets in the care of another person can be nerve-wracking. Which is why Rover, an on-demand pet care service, leans on social proof to build trust with visitors. The landing page includes testimonials from real clients and copy about its "Rover Guarantee" and 24/7 support. Of course, the cute pictures of animals help too.

Ready to build your landing page?

Whether you’re using a landing page template or building one from scratch, it’s essential to keep these best practices top of mind. And remember to test your landing pages to improve their effectiveness.

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19 Great Landing Page Examples You'll Want to Copy in 2022 was originally posted by Local Sign Company Irvine, Ca. https://goo.gl/4NmUQV https://goo.gl/bQ1zHR http://www.pearltrees.com/anaheimsigns