Whether you are designing your own website or engaging the services of a third party, the one thing that you should come up with is a style guide. Essentially a style guide is a document that designers use to establish consistency across their design and link it to any pre-established brand elements.
Of course if you aren’t a designer or have little or no experience in that area that may sound daunting, but all you really need to do is take the following elements into account to come up with a solid style guide:
- Typography
Choose the fonts, sizes and colors that you intend to use throughout your design as headings, subheadings, body text, and so on. By defining your typography at the outset you can make sure it is readable and fits with the rest of the design and its style.
- Color palette
Generally you should use three colors as your primary color palette for use throughout your website. In some cases you might want to define additional secondary colors that you intend to use in a limited fashion to create contrast in certain elements that need to stand out.
- Images
As websites become more visual and images play a more important role, your style guide should cover them too. While you may not have the specific images you need, noting down the traits of the images that you want to use and including examples that represent them can help.
- Icons
Most websites utilize icons in their navigation and the type of icons that you use can influence the overall style of your design. Ideally icons should communicate their message easily, while also complementing the design and its style.
- Brand values
While not strictly speaking an ‘element’ within the design itself, brand values are an important element in a style guide as they can help provide direction. At the end of the day the design is going to represent the brand, and so it must be guided by it.
Based on those elements you should have a good idea of what needs to be done. To start out all you need to do is jot down the overall style that you’re trying to achieve, with notes that cover the elements listed above. That should provide your website design with a structure that you can use to design the site yourself, or pass on to a designer so that they understand what you want in the design.
In some cases when you engage the services of a web designer Sydney they may offer to help you come up with a style guide. If that is the case then your initial style guide can act as a base from which to work from. All said and done the important thing is that you will be able to provide an outline of the style that you want your website to take on while making sure its elements consistently represent the brand.
