Below is a quick list of some well known digital companies who have launched online style guides over the past year. Most of these began purely as internal tools. As the resources proved more and more valuable, they’ve all become available for public use.

What are the benefits of an online style guide?

  • Gives viewers a quick and digestible overview of your brand
  • Faster integration with/of your products through reusable code and real-world branding samples
  • Less technical support required, which frees up valuable employee resources for other means
  • Proves your companies’ dedication to, and support of, your tech base
  • Shows off your creative and technological abilities
  • Builds a community around the company
  • Creates a potential conversion funnel for organizations who become power users

Most large organizations have already gone through a branding process and have a style guide for their marketing efforts.

What online guides allow, that traditional ones don’t, is much greater connectivity to your brand, in a modern format, quickly navigable from anywhere in the world.

In conclusion, by providing public access to your brand materials through either static content, code snippets, downloadable assets, or re-usable templates, you are doing a couple things:

  • Decreasing the burden on your employees, contractors, and partners who usually have to create new materials from scratch
  • Allowing your brand to be dispersed rapidly and broadly, while remaining true to your standards.