What is the difference between a Style Guide, a Brand Bible, and a Design System?
It's easy to get these terms mixed up as they all relate to brand consistency, but they serve different purposes. Think of them in a hierarchy. The Brand Bible is the highest level strategic document. It defines your brand's mission, voice, tone, and core values, it’s the 'why' behind your brand. A Design System is a comprehensive collection of reusable components, patterns, and code, paired with clear standards, that serves as the single source of truth for an entire organisation. It's the complete 'how' for building products at scale.
A Style Guide is a more focused, tactical document that sits within this structure. It specifically outlines the visual aspects of your brand. If your brand was a house, the Brand Bible is the architectural philosophy. The Design System is the full catalogue of prefabricated walls, windows, and doors. The Style Guide is the specific paint swatch book, the font for the house number, and the rules for spacing the furniture.
At Tahi Studio, a Style Guide is often the first tangible design asset we create. It translates your brand's essence into a practical rulebook within Figma, which then forms the foundation of your Webflow site. For larger, more complex projects, this Style Guide can be the first step towards building a full Design System.
Why is a Style Guide essential for my Webflow project?
A Style Guide is the bedrock of a professional and scalable Webflow website. Its primary role is to enforce visual consistency. As your website grows with new pages, blog posts, and landing pages, a Style Guide ensures that every element, from buttons to headings, looks and feels like it belongs. This creates a seamless and trustworthy experience for your users, avoiding the disjointed or 'patchwork' feel that can happen over time.
Furthermore, it makes the development process incredibly efficient. In Webflow, we can translate the rules from your Style Guide directly into global CSS classes and variables. This means when we set your primary brand colour or heading font, that style is applied site wide. If you ever decide to update a colour or font, we can make the change in one place and it instantly cascades across the entire website. This makes your site not just consistent, but also incredibly easy to maintain and scale.
How does a Style Guide save my business time and money?
The return on investment for a well-crafted Style Guide is significant. Firstly, it drastically reduces design and development hours. By establishing clear visual rules upfront, it eliminates lengthy debates and decision making during the build process. We won't need to have meetings about what shade of green to use or how much space should be around an image because those decisions have already been made. This efficiency translates directly into faster project completion and lower costs.
Secondly, a Style Guide is your best defence against 'Design Debt'. Design Debt is the accumulation of small inconsistencies and compromises over time, which eventually require a costly and time consuming overhaul to fix. A Style Guide prevents this debt from building up by ensuring every addition to your site is consistent from day one. It also makes onboarding new designers, developers, or even marketing team members much quicker, as they have a clear reference to follow, saving you valuable time and resources in the long run.
What should be included in a typical Figma Style Guide?
A robust Style Guide created in Figma should be a clear, comprehensive, and easy to use reference for your entire team. At a minimum, it should detail the core visual elements of your brand. This includes Logo Usage, showing your primary and secondary logos, their clear space requirements, and rules on how and when to use them. It must also feature your Colour Palette, defining your primary, secondary, and accent colours, as well as neutrals for text and backgrounds, complete with their HEX or HSL values.
Beyond the basics, a great Style Guide will also define your Typography rules, specifying the font families, sizes, weights, and line heights for every text style from large headings to small body copy. It should also include guidelines for Spacing and Grids to maintain a consistent rhythm across the site, an Iconography library showing your approved icon set, and guidance on Imagery style, outlining the tone and feel of photography or illustrations that align with your brand.
How does Tahi Studio help create and implement a Style Guide?
At Tahi Studio, a Style Guide isn't just a document, it's a foundational part of our process. Whether we are helping you with a Brand Identity Refresh or building a new website with our Total Webflow Subscription, establishing your visual rules in Figma is one of our first and most important steps. We work with you to understand your brand's personality and translate it into a practical and beautiful Style Guide that becomes your team’s single source of truth for all things visual.
We then take it a step further. We don't just hand you a PDF and walk away. We meticulously implement your Style Guide within Webflow using global styles and variables. This ensures your Style Guide is a living, breathing part of your website that powers its consistency and makes future updates remarkably simple. It's how we build scalable, professional, and easy to manage websites that truly represent your brand.
