Style guide

A style guide is a document — usually static — that records how a brand or product looks and sounds: logo usage, colour palette, typography, voice and tone, imagery rules. It's the spiritual ancestor of the modern design system and still useful for communicating standards to people who don't work in Figma every day.

Style guides become limiting when they're the only artefact: a PDF can't enforce its own rules in production code. That's why most product teams now pair a style guide with a design system (and ideally a living style guide generated from real components). For brand-level standards, brand guidelines cover the same territory in more detail — see our brand guidelines guide.

Related: Brand guidelines · Design system · Living style guide · Foundations