This week we learned about style guides. A style guide is a set of guidelines from the designer that include information on the brand’s overall aesthetic. This covers the color scheme, typography, and usage of the logo. A style guide is created to ensure that the style and formatting are consistent throughout all media put out by the brand. This week’s guest speaker Dee Thompson, also talked about style guides during her interview. She talked about how they are an important tool to effectively get your message out and build brand recognition and trust with your customers.
I found this week’s lecture and guest interview to be very insightful and helpful for me. I think this week’s content was very informative to me as I believe it would be relevant to apply this in my future career. I especially appreciated Dee’s insight on building through social media and her many techniques for creating content. She mentioned the importance of a style guide for creating consistent and cohesive content as well as creating seasonal and evergreen content.
Just a couple of years ago, I began creating social media content for my brother, because he started a real estate business on the side. When creating posts for his social media, I made the typical “portfolio-esc” posts, which included houses listed and sold, but I wanted to make his page more interesting to draw in potential customers, so I began to create simple infographics about real estate, and the market at that time. When doing so, I tried to keep all my posts consistent, using his brand’s colors, the same font, and similar layouts to create consistency. I wasn’t aware at the time, but I was creating my own style guide for my brother’s social media.
Shortly after, it was time to create business cards and print flyers. I stuck to the same color scheme and typography I used for his social media, but now had been given a set of rules from his brokerage on what the flyers had to include to follow company and government guidelines. They didn’t label this a style guide, but it was very similar to one with information on logo usage, and what kind of information was mandatory in the flyers.
Going back to Dee’s interview, I appreciated her insight into social media and content creation. She talked about creating evergreen content, which I agree is important. This would be content that is relative all year round. For my brother’s social media, I created posts on the buying process and tips on saving for a home. She also talked about having seasonal content to attract a new audience. For my brother’s social media, I created a post on spring cleaning. I didn’t think that seasonal posts could apply to real estate, but now that I understand the importance of it, I’m going to focus on creating more this holiday season.
Another tip Dee shared was recycling your old content. I had never thought about this before and ran out of ideas pretty quickly. With this tip, I plan to simplify and re-share my old infographics as stories and reels to recycle the old posts while still providing fresh content. Overall, I took a lot from this week’s lecture, and hope to successfully apply these tips to not only my brother’s social media but to my future career as well.