Consistent brand identity and the success of a new website depend on how good the design guide is. The contents of a design guide are the ingredients that can make your project successful and portray what you want to convey to potential customers about the products and services of your company. Don’t consider it as just another document; instead, think of it is a Bible that can lead your brand to the helm. Ideally, you should have six essential things in your design guide:

1.    Design guidelines

Typography palettes, font designs, color swatches, and every aspect of the design should be clearly outlined. This helps to understand the philosophy of the design easily. It allows users to apply their design style accurately across all mediums. Try to specify design guidelines by mentioning the pixel differences.

2.    Brand identity examples

Showcasing visual elements is crucial for presenting design guides. It should represent the way you prefer to see the design materials. For example, many graphic design courses teach newbies to take screenshots of website homepages or mobile homepages that show distinctive brand identity. These serve as reminders that designing a website entails bringing out the story behind a brand, compelling visitors to learn more.

3.    Voice and personality

Compared to visual elements, writing style guidelines are often subdued, but they are equally crucial to a website’s success. The more descriptive the writing style is, the more impactful the visuals will be. It is the description that brings life to the images you choose. In fact, the descriptive writing style becomes the voice and personality of the brand, and people expect to see similar descriptions when you launch new products.

4.    Pattern and element styles

The style of patterns and elements in the design guide tells a lot about how experienced you are. And, while it is not always possible to design printed elements, you can sometimes play with color palettes, logos, and different aspects of patterns such as navigation and form fields. There should be a dedicated section in the design guide that includes these elements.

5.    SEO keywords

Probably the road to success of any website is to have optimized keywords for search engines. It has to be a combination of what the product or service wants to convey and what the viewers are looking for when they are searching for related products. One technique to introduce keywords successfully in the design guide is by using them in the description of the images.

6.    Code snippets

Slider effects, small animations, buttons – all these are essential code snippets that you shouldn’t skip in your website design guide. They add to the daily workflow so that you don’t have to enter all the specs manually. From simple blog posts to drop shipping websites, code snippets work efficiently in almost all types of sites. Firefox, for example, allows you to add design component information in your design guide. It’s not necessary to include a library of snippets; only add the ones that are used the most.

Design guides are not static documents that users can overlook casually. If you want a website that best represents your brand identity, starts filling your design guide with these essential elements.