Web Design – Your Logo is your style guide

There are projects in life where its beneficial to look at the ‘big picture’ to get the best results, where having all the information and various ‘how to’ examples laid out in front of you will give you a great head start (hello, finance budgeting!) yet as a website designer, I’d like to say this area isn’t quite one of them.

I’ve seen how hard it is for clients to take half their Pinterest board and try to push it into several pages of a website, over a few thousand words, across multiple areas of their business… and pulling that back is a difficult process.

Where would I ask a client to begin their decision-making when designing their website?

- The project/business name and theme

- The 2/3 main styles of font to use

- The colour palette

- The style of graphics to use

- And a tagline which sets the tone of your website

And luckily, you can fit all of that in a logo design and use it as your mini style guide to get started.

Going through this process on a small scale first means:

1. Changes are quicker

2. It is easier to experiment with multiple styles and see them side by side for quick decision making

3. -You can choose your 2/3 main font styles in just a few words

4. Testing your brand across a variety of formats, backgrounds and sizes is simpler, which may inspire new style choices (Which pushes you back to step 1!)

I’m not a branding expert (Yet!) but when clients have come to me with logos or a solid brand identity first, the process of creating their ideal custom website comes together far more smoothly than without.

Here is the logo of Popp In’s Therapy Centre, a website I still maintain today. I was able to pull almost all the key points I talked about above, which created a great foundation for the website design.

Logo artist: Nina Laing – Logo style guide created by me

All these elements followed through into the final 3-page website design, right through to the pictures we took and the business cards that we created at the same time.

I hope this saves you time and money if you need a website yourself in the future!

I offer a free 30-minute consultation for solo professionals and small businesses looking to expand their online marketing with simple but effective custom websites. Click here to get on my calendar for a chat all about you and your business needs.