Your school needs a consistent and uniform look and feel. Your school style guide is a document that contains formatted artwork of your official school logo, colors, commonly used designs, and lettering, among other markings and graphics.
The style guide is shared with sign makers, t-shirt printers, media, other schools and anyone else who may need to reproduce your logo. You work hard to build your school’s reputation and culture. A SportsGraphics Style Guide ensures that every banner or wall graphic we print bears your marketable trademark as you build your brand.
A Style Guide Sets Your School Apart
Style guides can provide ground support for your marketing strategies by ensuring that all branding and messaging is relevant and helps you reach goals. Establishing a brand style guide distinguishes your brand from its competitors. This cohesion is important because it helps establish a strong brand voice that resonates with your audience, which is essential for building brand awareness. Over time, that awareness and consistency build trust, as well as a community.
As a school facilitator, you play a central role in determining how others will see your school’s brand. So the question you need to ask is not, What will everyone see? Rather, you need to ask, What do I want everyone to see? And how will what they see be different from what they see in other schools?
A style guide answers these questions in a more tangible way by allowing you to see your design objectives in print:
● Unique lettering
● Color combination
● Mascot presentation
● Elements that only your students/fans/community can identify with
A Style Guide Does Not Allow for Deviation
In an organization as large a university, everyone has an opinion about how your school should be portrayed in the public eye. There are lots of great ideas out there and plenty of room for discussion. Eventually, however, everyone involved in promoting and marketing your school’s image needs to arrive at a highly targeted consensus that allows for zero deviation.
Keeps everyone on the same page and presents a united front for marketing your school’s brand and image across the board.
What's In A Brand Style Guide?
There are essentially two elements contained in a brand style guide:
1. Visual Guide: A visual style guide shows how all content should be designed.
2. Content Style Guide: A content style guide controls how the copy and text within the design are developed.
Both work together to perfect the whole. Therefore, a content style guide gives us clear instructions on how to frame and construct the product we want to present to our audience. A visual style guide shows us how to design the product and make it presentable. In the marketing world, neither content nor visuals act alone. Rather, they complement each other and form a complete visual concept.
An example of how both a visual and content style guide works would be in presenting your school’s logo on a wall graphic. When sending a designer a school logo to print, you would include the following information for both visual style and content style:
● The logo
● Corresponding color formats for print
● Size of logo, and size of logo in relation to other elements in the overall layout
● How the log is applied in various situations
● Typefaces used within the logo
● What the main marketing drive or connection is between the logo and its viewers
Providing this information addresses all possible questions or issues that come up in the overall design of the product. The style guide would also include items that the designer should avoid to eliminate any possible mistakes or do-overs.
Branding and Graphics Design From SportsGraphics
If you are looking for innovative solutions for designing your floor mats, wall graphics, or other branding products, then contact SportsGraphics today. We offer a wide range of branding products for schools and athletic organizations.
To find out more about our products or to place an order, call us at 1-800-257-6405.