A style guide is an essential tool in any web designer’s arsenal. Style guides clarify the look, voice, and feel of a creative project, laying the foundation for successful collaboration. By creating a style guide, you can ensure that you and your client have a shared understanding of their brand. You can also enforce consistency across the web design project. When every team member has clear guidelines to follow, there’s less room for error and less time needed for tedious revisions.

Style guides also serve as valuable resources for clients because they keep a brand’s best practices in one place. The style guides you create can not only streamline projects in the short-term, but they can also deliver value for years to come. Your client and their team can rely on your style guide to onboard new team members, settle in-house debates, and create best-in-class work. Then, when their style guide eventually needs a refresh, they can turn to you for an update.

What is a web design style guide?

A style guide is like an instruction manual for your client’s brand. It codifies in-house best practices, specifying the colors, fonts, and logos you should use when creating branded assets. Many style guides establish a brand’s editorial voice, clarifying things like personality, tone, and appropriate words to use when writing for the brand.

What to include in a style guide:

• Color guidelines: swatches, hex codes, and color modes

• Typography guidelines: fonts, sizes, styles, and spacing

• Logo guidelines: dimensions, resolutions, and platform-friendly variations

• Layout guidelines: margins, padding, and templates

• Image guidelines: approved photo libraries, restrictions, and credit formats

• Editorial guidelines: voice, vocabulary, grammar, and style

Some style guides will fit on a single page, while others will be several pages long. The key is to focus on clarity. If your style guide does its job, everyone on the team should understand how to create work that’s consistent, top-notch, and on-brand. 

How to create a style guide for your client

Crystallize your client’s brand

To create a great style guide, you need to understand who your client is. Research their brand, industry, and target audience. Examine what sets them apart from competitors and ask them about their goals. From there, determine what you, as a professional web designer can help them accomplish.

If your client has in-house guidelines, ask to see them. Otherwise, create a mock style guide with the fonts, colors, and imagery your client currently uses. These working guidelines can give you a deeper understanding of your client’s brand, serving as both a starting point and a source of inspiration for your work.

As you craft your project proposal, take time to explain your reasoning. By walking your client through the why behind your ideas, you can ensure you’re on the same page about their brand identity and overall business goals.

Define key visual elements

Once you and your client have a shared vision, bring it to life by creating a style guide. When done right, your style guide should be illustrative and instructive. It should help your client envision their brand identity, and it should teach team members how to create on-brand work.

Start by defining key visual elements, like colors, typography, and logos. Walk through every color in your client’s palette. Clarify which typefaces you’ll use, how you’ll style them, and where you’ll use them. Create logos in a few different formats, so you’ll have options that work for every platform and use case. 

Instead of listing out these guidelines, illustrate them using the design elements themselves. Work with the colors in your client’s palette, and style text using the fonts, sizes, and weights you’ve chosen. By doing so, you can know the visual elements play well together. You can also show team members what branded assets should look like when they’re properly designed.

Your style guide should also be replicable, so be specific. When citing colors, include swatches, hex codes, and color modes (i.e., CMYK vs. RGB). When referencing fonts, clarify size, weight, tracking, and leading. Lastly, when defining key visuals (like logos), include high-resolution files that team members can pull directly from the style guide. 

This specificity can help cut down on inconsistencies, guiding both you and your client to  confidently create work that adheres to in-house guidelines.

Outline layout best practices

Visual branding goes beyond colors and typography. So once you’ve established the basics, expand your style guide to include design details, layout guidelines, and accessibility best practices.

To ensure your client’s website offers a great user experience, define what web design elements should look like. Establish in-house styles for navigation elements (menus), interactive elements (buttons and forms), and textual elements (headings, hyperlinks, and pull quotes). Consider what they’ll look like in different states. For instance, how should the elements change when a visitor hovers over or clicks on them? 

Then, provide layout guidelines so your client’s website feels cohesive from page to page. Define appropriate element spacing (margins, padding, and borders), and specify a go-to grid system. You can even include approved web design templates for team members to use when building new pages. 

To help your client reach the broadest audience possible, include accessibility tips in your web design style guide. Remind team members to keep text legible, add descriptive alt text to images, and use color combinations with adequate contrast.

Establish an editorial voice

As you continue building your style guide, widen your lens. Since storytelling plays a key role in brand building, it may make sense to include content and copy guidelines in your client’s style guide.

Take stock of your client’s current editorial standards: do they adhere to an official style guide or have existing content guidelines? If they don’t, look for themes in their written materials. Pay attention to their general tone of voice, whether they use contractions and Oxford commas, how they format numbers and measurements, and how they write and capitalize headings. Note idiosyncrasies, like language they use or avoid. If you spot inconsistencies, flag them. Your client can clarify what their in-house style is, and you can add those rules to the style guide. 

To avoid formatting mishaps, clarify when to use different heading levels (H1, H2, and H3, and so on), how to structure lists (bullet points or numerals), and when to bold or italicize text.

This is also a great place to mention SEO best practices. Remind team members to add strategic keywords and internal links to their writing, use clean URLs, and add SEO titles and descriptions to every page.

Share and update your style guide

As you finalize the style guide, ask for feedback. Confirm the ground rules you’ve set align with your client’s vision for their brand, and check in with stakeholders from different teams. Ask copywriters to review your editorial guidelines, have the marketing team look over SEO best practices, and collaborate with in-house designers as you establish the visual identity of the brand. 

This process will help you address questions and concerns as they arise. It can also help you smoothly hand off the project. By getting everyone acquainted with the style guide, you can ensure they know where to find it and how to use it going forward.

Keep in mind that style guides are living documents. As your client’s brand grows, their style guide should evolve along with it. Help your client implement a process for updating the style guide: who has permission to edit it, and whose approval do they need before finalizing changes? You can also offer to update the style guide for them, making your impact as a web designer even more enduring.

Knowing how to create style guides is a vital skill for professional web designers. A great style guide can help you collaborate more seamlessly and create more efficiently. It can also help you earn a reputation for making your clients’ lives easier long after you’ve finished your work.

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