By The Book: Create a Style Guide for Your Brand

Courtney Eliseo's class picks up a very specific point in the design process: the identity is finished, approved, and now needs to survive contact with other people. That is a narrower and more useful premise than most branding classes attempt, and the course stays disciplined about it for all 92 minutes.

Structure and approach

The class opens with a survey of real-world style guides, from Foursquare's straightforward instructional format to the more moody, image-driven Jack Daniel's guide by I Am Always Hungry, and the sprawling Cisco and Pfizer systems at the corporate end. This framing does real work: it shows the spectrum between conceptual and instructional guides before asking students to place their own project on it. From there the course moves into content planning, then InDesign setup (grids, facing pages, bleed, the multiple-of-four page rule for print), then walks section by section through what she considers essential: logo usage, color, typography, and graphic elements.

Each section follows the same useful pattern, an overview page, then specific rules, then a concrete example pulled from her own client project for a brand called Sloan Taylor. The logo usage lesson is the most actionable of the bunch, laying out specific "do not" rules such as never dropping the logo into a shape, never tinting it, never recoloring it with secondary palette colors, and never stacking more than one logo on a single surface. These are the kind of small, easily-violated rules that actually cause inconsistency in practice, and naming them explicitly is where the course earns its keep.

Strengths and limits

The color section is similarly concrete, walking through how to organize a palette into primary, secondary, and tertiary tiers and how to translate a color across PMS, CMYK, RGB, and HEX without pretending the process is more precise than it is. The final lesson on typesetting, cleaning up double spaces, enforcing smart quotes, fixing rag and hyphenation, is a small but genuinely useful checklist that most branding classes skip entirely.

Where the course is honest to a fault is in acknowledging its own scope. Eliseo says upfront that her work is with very small businesses, one to five employees, and that she has never built a guide for a large corporation. She shows Cisco and Pfizer examples specifically as points of comparison rather than models to imitate, which is a smart way to handle the gap. Still, anyone hoping for guidance on complex multi-brand architecture, web or UI guidelines, or extensive photography direction will find those topics gestured at rather than taught. Web guidelines in particular are explicitly waved off with a promise of links in the resource PDF.

This is also not a class for anyone still building design fundamentals. Grid theory, InDesign basics, and typographic principles are all mentioned and then deliberately left for outside resources, since the course is billed as intermediate. The class works best as a template and checklist for a designer who already knows how to execute, not as an education in graphic design itself. Within that lane, it delivers a clean, replicable process.

What you will learn

• ·How to distinguish and structure instructional versus conceptual style guide content
• ·How to set up an InDesign document with facing pages, grids, bleeds, and page-multiples-of-four for print compatibility
• ·How to write logo usage rules, including specific do-not examples like tinting, recoloring, or shape-cropping a logo
• ·How to build out a color section with PMS, CMYK, RGB, and HEX breakdowns and translation workflow between them
• ·How to typeset a finished document, cleaning up rag, hyphenation, orphans, widows, and smart quotes
• ·How to package and deliver final assets in organized EPS, JPEG, PDF, and PNG folder structures