It's the end of the design process. We’ve handed over the final brand guidelines as a PDF, along with the logo suite, fonts, colour scheme and asset concepts. There’s a real sense of excitement and eagerness to get this brand out into the wild.
So, we move on, right? Project done. The charity's website is up and running, you have your brand guidelines, that's it. We shake hands, send the final invoice and move onto the next job. Wrong.
Fast-forward six months. Out of curiosity, we check back to see how it's all going. We have a little peek at the website. Everything looks… the same. The interim hero image that was put up until you sourced a better one is still sitting there proudly front and centre. The social media channels are filled with unusual templates and peculiar new colours, finished off with a muddled tone of voice or, more likely, several voices. Strange things are afoot.
This happens way more often than we care to admit. And at some point, someone inevitably asks, “What on earth is going on with this brand?” It’s started doing its own thing. A comms manager's nightmare manifest before its even had a chance to stretch its wings. Please don’t let this brand become a dodo.
So what's happened here? It remained stationary, without the opportunity to evolve. We create guidelines, as much as we try not to, in a bit of a vacuum. We test them out, as much as we can within the budget, to make them resilient as possible when used by multiple internal teams or by other designers - those who love nothing more than sucking their teeth like a plumber staring at another plumber's work before ‘fixing it’ (I should know, I’ve been that designer… and sometimes still am). But IRL there’s always tweaking and adapting to do once live. This is the nature of design.
In reality your brand has to evolve - sometimes to fix unforeseen problems within the design system, and other times to respond to cultural shifts or technological advances. In the past, brand guidelines were the holy book, the Bible in Printable Document Format. It might even have been printed! Go way back to the old standard manuals of British Rail and NASA for example. Every uniform, sign, rocket-ship and envelope was accounted for, and this was great when collateral was mostly printed. The runs on things happened much more slowly and the costs of changing the brand were much higher. The brand had to be stationary. Brand positioning wasn't questioned as regularly, and brands didn't have to be as adaptable as they do now. That was fine back then, markets were more stable, but things have changed. A website is not a static entity. Social media is not a static platform. Your brand needs to respond to these fluctuating landscapes.
The problem with the PDF and logo, which sit in various internal filing systems, is that it’s easy to lose control over what’s being used, where, and by whom. More and more content needs to be produced by an array of teams and suddenly (or not so suddenly) the good old PDF is defunct. It's a fossil. What's needed now is a central system. One that allows comms teams to store and manage the latest versions of all brand assets, update logos, add new graphics, create design systems, and control access to approved imagery and team permissions.
What we're talking about in essence is a brand asset management system - a living brand guide. This allows comms teams to quickly assess and approve content before it's published into the beastly World Wide Web. It also allows your brand to evolve smoothly - whether it’s adding a colour to the secondary palette, updating imagery or introducing illustrations. It allows your brand to grow and develop to fulfil the needs of internal teams. By keeping everything in the same, easily updatable place you can keep people aligned. You're able to maintain clarity and consistency for your audiences while keeping your brand agile, allowing you to focus resources where they’re needed most.
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