A quick response to the fast company quote below.
Anyone who’s ever designed for a marketing agency has probably had to deal with a dreaded “style guide”–a Kafka-esque document laying out all the rules for what you can and can’t do, and how you should and shouldn’t do it. The soul-deadening power of these manuals goes double–they’re a creative straitjacket, and they’re horribly, horribly boring
Here is why you may need one and when you don't.
You need one if:
You don't need one if
You need one if:
- You have a large organistion with many offices scattered that are geographically separate from one another
- You have admin and secretarial staff that like to get creative with Microsoft Word and Comic Sans
- You have 10 years worth of logo variations on computers scattered throughout your organisation
- Your not sure what colour your corporate identity uses
You don't need one if
- You have one person who handles all of the business communication
- You have one centralised location for all of your corporate collateral
- You plan to stay with the same design/brand/advertising firm for the life of your business
- You are a one man band
- You don't care about consistency
- You want to spend double the time recreating what should have been done right the first time