Daily Business Resources for Entrepreneurs, Web Designers, & Creatives by Andy Sowards

Here’s the Best Plan For Your Ever-Changing Website

A website is an ever-changing venture. All who have worked on the project have seen it getting changed ever so often after its launch that they don’t want to have it in their portfolio! So it’s a good idea to make a style guide for the people who assume ownership of the project post-launch. You can’t stop clients from ruining the website. A style guide will thus effectively establish the rules for future plans and changes.

Reasons To Have A Style Guide


Maintain Consistency With a Website Style Guide

Branding Guidelines: Strategic Brand Summary


125+ Amazing & Beautiful Examples Of Branding Design Inspiration

Make it short but sweet. Give your vision for your design in a precise and brief manner and the keywords that people must remember when they design. Most people go to the picture pages right away, but there are chances that they will read some sentences here. The essence of good branding is powerful photography, along with some paras that define and inspire the brand. The initial sentence should send the message across. Beautiful photography should be intertwined with the primary message.

Logo Variations

Logos are very closely connected with brands, for the print as well as the Web. So have variations of your logos and elucidate minimum sizes. It’s important to clarify minimum sizes for reasons of legibility, for the crest can be shown on its own or with the tagline or name. Have your logos made with different colors and clarify which colors can be used. Designers can get many design options with Think Brick. The idea is to be both flexible and consistent.

Show Examples of What To Do and What You Must Not Do


I Love New York Logo Brand Identity Guidelines

Being a professional you shouldn’t fool around with your logos. Many designers will think that they’ve done a fantastic job, but they are not right. It’s your task to point this out to them and tell them what they can do with a design and what they cannot. The I Love New York logo is a classic example of cleverly defining in their brand guidelines what you must NOT do with their logo.

Need For White Space


21 Inspiring Examples of White Space in Web Design

Never underestimate the necessity of white space. Incorporate a space reference, particularly for your logo. Don’t specify centimeters or inches; use a part of the logo itself, like a shape or a letter. In this way it’s immaterial if the logo is small or big; the space surrounding it will be adequate.

Colors Palettes


10 Beautiful Website Color Palettes That Increase Engagement

Color palettes are a must; and also for what the colors must be used. Include formats for the Web as well as print like Pantones, CMYK, (if they are still alive) and RGB. A CMYK substitute for Pantones must always be used for matching can be hard sometimes. Be clear about your primary as well as secondary colors and where/when to use them.

Fonts/Typefaces


Introducing The Yale Typeface

You will have to describe the typefaces you wish to use, like sizes, spacing, line height, colors, and headline vs. body font and so on. Include Web options for fonts that are non-Web. Yale University actually has a typeface of its own, designed by Matthew Carter, which it gives to its designers and employees. Yale also spells out when the fonts must be used. It has an exclusive Web font division which explains which fonts are to be used there.

Layouts/Grids


Grid-​​Based Layouts 101

You will promote best practices and encourage consistency if you set up templates as well as instructions for grids. Generic templates help to curb over-creativity in the layout. For example, the Barbican has, in its website, installed flexible and customized building blocks, which mean they will in all likelihood stay in a grid.

Voice Tone


Finding Your Tone Of Voice

A huge section of a brand’s character is the copy. A terrific way to keep the brand’s consistency is to define the tone. When several people write the copy, the brand is able to sound as if it has many personalities. You will find this in easyJet, where both oral and written clear-cut personalities can be seen.

Guide To Copy-Writing


Copywriting: Successful Writing for Design, Advertising and Marketing

A style book on copy-writing can help those who need the client to write his/her own copy and still maintain consistency. Most people judge copy-writing in a sort of subconscious way. When reading, a human being’s brain instinctively seeks out evenness and patterns. If the copy-writing is poor it can spoil the flow of reading.

Images/Photographs


Choosing Images For Your Website – The Minimalist Guide

Many designers establish a singular quality in their images and photographs. Show some examples to your clients; explain why these choices are good. Show them with reference to your design context and describe to them why they were selected for that framework.

Bringing It Together


10 Magically Meticulous Design Style Guides

Show some examples of how the photography, logo and text will look together, and the chosen formats. Skype has done a great job of pointing out what it wants from designers in the way of photography and illustrations. It shows examples of the slight variations between bad and good usage. The guide is stunning and worth taking a look (along with all the other amazing design style guides mentioned in the link above).

What To Include In Web Guidelines


How To Create A Design Style Guide: 20 Pro Tips

Many designers create guidelines for branding but don’t include important Web style guides. Like the guidelines for branding, Web guidelines retain consistency — from styles of button to navigation architecture.

Order Of Buttons


Principles for Successful Button Design

You have taken care to decide what all your buttons are for and painstakingly classified their states. But, regrettably, your designer has not fixed your hover states; or he/she has made their own — and they are terrible to look at.
Design a page which shows the functions of all the links, including buttons, the proper behavior of all of them and when they must be used. If a button stands out, clarify how many times at the most it must be used for a page. This is normally once. Classify the hover and visited and disabled states for all the buttons.

Icons Size, Spacing


21 Inspiring Examples of Icons in Web Design

A terrific way to endorse consistency is to define size as well as spacing. Another way is to show where your icons must be used. If icons are to be used sparingly, this aspect must be made clear.

Navigation


Navigation and Wayfinding – Interface Design

Good and consistent navigation can define a website’s success. Pages are sometimes added after the designing work is completed. So you must leave some space for these additions. A website will become cleaner if people get to know about new navigation tools and states that are logged in. A truly fantastic guideline would describe in detail seemingly minuscule functionality such as: what you must do with lengthy user names, the space that everything must have and more.

Basic Code Guidelines


CSS Style Guides

You cannot teach a person how to code like you; however, you can suggest some basic tips which will lessen the damage. These are:

Formatting


Writing an Interface Style Guide

Here are some good guidelines for formatting:

Summing Up

What will be the size of your guidelines book? Hundreds of pages will not engage anyone except the most hard-working designers. So, a brief 3-page summary is best to use daily; a more detailed 20-page manuscript will suffice for intricate tasks. As they say, less is sometimes more!

I hope you have liked this small ‘treatise’ on website design guidelines. I shall be happy to get your feedback by way of comments!

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