Free Style Guide Template InDesign for your Awesome Mom Blog!

Hi mama bloggers!  Do you love playing around with Adobe products?  Perhaps you’re like me and you’re not a graphic designer…and you just want a starting point for creating a style guide for your new website!  Well, look no further!  I’ve created a visual style guide template InDesign just for you!  I don’t consider myself that creative.  I’m not a photographer or artist or designer.  BUT…I love playing anyway!  So I hope this blog guide template helps you out.

If you’re short on time and just want to get started and download the InDesign template, just click on the image below (I also hope you can stick around to keep reading…but, hey, I know we’re all busy!):

When you go to make those oh-so-important website visuals and website images in Illustrator or Photoshop or InDesign, do you ever forget what fonts to use, what colours to use, and what images to use?  (or even…what image sizes to use?)

I’ve decided to dive down today and make a “visual style guide” for Momtepreneur.  In the process, I’m going to share with you how exactly I’m doing it and then I’m leaving you with a free downloadable style guide template InDesign.

The 4 Most Critical Elements to Include in your Blog’s Visual Style Guide

As you think about what to include in your visual style guide, here are 4 elements to definitely include!

1. Your Logo – How to Use It…and How NOT to Use It
2. Your Color Palette – Including Hex, RGB, CMYK, and Pantone References
3. Your Typography/Font Guidelines – and how to use them
4. Your Imagery Style – including your standard blog image sizes!

1. Create Your Logo Guide

My logo guide is pretty simple right now.  I have one logo.  No color variation.  So for my logo guide page, I decided to just throw up my one logo and move on.  In the future, I might decide to add a bit more guidance, however for now I think this will do the trick:

You can have my style guide template InDesign for free, just click here.  All the pages I show here in this blog post are included in the download (plus fonts, colors, images), and you can add your own variations.

2. Create Your Color Palette

I’m not an expert at palettes or anything.  But there’s a great resource to help you explore different color palettes and choose your favorite:  Coolers.co!

As I was playing around with my color palette for momtepreneur.com, here’s a quick snapshot of me creating my color palette:

Coolers also lets you quickly see and choose from other tints and shades of your palette choices:

So once I had those, I chose my core five colors plus four lighter shades and created my “Color Palette” page for my visual style guide template InDesign.  I included the Hex Code for each color in a text box overlaying each color block:

When you’re doing your own style guide, you might also want to add in the RGB and CMYK values for each color.

3. Create Your Typography/Font Guidelines

The fonts or typeface you use for your blog can really set the tone, the voice, and the overall feel for your blog.  As my primary target audience is mainly women, from about 23-55 years old, I wanted clean, feminine fonts for my blog.  I’ve recently started appreciating Google Fonts, and picked some faves from there to use on my blog and in my images, printables, and content upgrades:

1. Montserrat – you can go and download it here
2. Open Sans – you can go and download it here
3. Sacramento – you can go and download it here

(Also, if you download my free style guide template InDesign, then all the fonts are included in the download.)

Once you choose font pairings you’re happy with, format them into your visual style guide, such as this:

4. Create Your Imagery Style Guide

Images are so very, very important for creating your blog content.  I’ve seen it written again and again – blog posts with images get 5x the views.  Now, who knows if I’ve got that stat right, but who cares – if I were to guess, I’d say that’s even a low guesstimate!  We all know intuitively that pictures are more interesting than big blocks of text.  So, it’s pretty darn important to define your style, mood, and types of imagery you want used on your blog.

If you are looking for stock imagery, you need to go and check out these two resources – they were lifesavers for me!

1. TwinsMommy – 18 Places for FREE Girly and Styled Stock Photos
2. Canva – Free Stock Photos: 73 Best Sites To Find Awesome Free Images

Next up, if you need to create images every day for your blog, and if you’re anything like me, then you basically need a constant reminder of how big to make different images.  For example, what size is your “featured image” for your blog content?  What size does your “blog title image” need to be?  Here are the 23 image sizes you need to include in your visual style guide, which I’ve included in my downloadable style guide template InDesign:

1. For your blog:
   1. Header Image
   2. Post Featured Image
   3. Title Image
   4. “Download Now” Content Upgrade Images
   5. Email Header
2. For Facebook:
   1. Profile Photo
   2. Cover Image
   3. Shared Image
   4. Link Image
   5. Highlighted Image
3. For Pinterest:
   1. Profile photo
   2. Board Cover
   3. Pin Size
   4. Tiny Thumbnails
4. For LinkedIn:
   1. Profile Photo
   2. Hero Image
   3. Company Banner Image
   4. Link Image
   5. Shared Image
5. For YouTube:
   1. Profile Photo
   2. Channel Cover Image
   3. Custom Video Thumbnail
   4. Video Upload

And now for your free Visual Style Guide Template InDesign!

If you want to download my visual style guide for momtepreneur.com and use it as a template to create your own…go for it:

And I think that’s a wrap friends! Hope you have fun!

Can you leave a comment below if you have any suggestions for improving the template, or if it worked out for you?