The best way to keep a style guide up to date and widely used in the organisation is to make it as a **Living style guide**, following a **Styleguide Driven Development** approach in the product development process.

In case you wonder what these two terms mean I leave you here a few definitions:

**Living style guide** definitions:

> “A design showcase built using live presentation codebase.”   
— _Chris LoPresto_ at [EmberConf 2016 ▶️ [7'00"]](https://youtu.be/Z1lL_Zo62h0?t=420)

> “A reference for a team of designers and developers to understand how an application will look and feel.”   
— _Patrick Hildebrandt_ in [What Is a Living Style Guide?](https://teamgaslight.com/blog/what-is-a-living-style-guide)

> “A living document of code, which details all the various elements and coded modules of your site or application.”   
— _Susan Robertson_ in [Creating Style Guides](http://alistapart.com/article/creating-style-guides)

> “A live version of a brand style guide.”   
“Living style guides are something that should be developed with every project”   
— _Brian Eye_ in [Night of the Living Style Guide](https://keyholesoftware.com/2015/07/20/living-style-guide/)

> “An important tool for web development today, especially in large, complex web applications.”   
— _Steven Lambert_ in [Creating A Living Style Guide: A Case Study](https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/05/creating-a-living-style-guide-case-study/)

> “A documentation of UI elements and patterns collected from a site or application with the purpose to allow developers to use consistent styles across their whole project.”   
— _Nancy Young_ in [Ten Living Style Guide Tools for Web Designers – Best of](http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/best-living-style-guide-tools/)

**Styleguide Driven Development** definitions:

> “Is the practice of using the styleguide as the focal point for all front-end UI development tasks”   
— _Matt Fordham_ in [Styleguide Driven Development](https://speakerdeck.com/mattfordham/styleguide-driven-development?slide=9) at [Seattle Interactive Conference 2014](http://www.seattleinteractive.com/)

> “A practice that encourages the separation of UX, Design & Frontend from Backend concerns. This is achieved by developing the UI separately in a styleguide.”   
— _Jordan Lewis_ in [We build Envato: Styleguide Driven Development](https://webuild.envato.com/blog/styleguide-driven-development/)

If you need to go deeper on how to implement a _Styleguide Driven Development_ process in your organisation, a simple [search on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Styleguide+Driven+Development) will bring you a few good presentations.

To finish, a very good example of style guide that implements these concepts is the [lonely planet style guide](http://rizzo.lonelyplanet.com/). They even wrote a very good article about why and how they built it: [A Maintainable Style Guide](http://engineering.lonelyplanet.com/2014/05/18/a-maintainable-styleguide.html)