Your Brand Guidelines Should Be Editable. Here's Why.

Picture this. Your organization has just completed a brand update. The logo is the same, but the type is new, the colors have been pushed, and the look is all new. While most of your brand guidelines will stay, a few major parts are changing. But calling up the last agency, dusting off an InDesign file and making the edit? So rarely does this happen that at no point in our twenty years in design have we witnessed it. We all start again. Creating a huge, new document to communicate the changes.

But that's not even the biggest reason why your brand guidelines should be editable.

Brands are evolving. And the documents that define them have to keep up.

The omnipotence of now

Most teams that brand an organization spend deep, valuable time understanding them, their audience, their uniqueness and their voice. We've laboured over the personality of the brand, crafted a name of strapline, finessed every anchor point of their mark. What's delivered is often the best articulation of the brand that's existed.

Up until today.

And after crafting the most considered document in the company, the final, final, revised, actually final version of the brand guidelines are published.

All of this labor and effort can give us the impression that our expression of a brand is as final as the document.

Most branding teams biggest fear is that our guidelines will be misapplied. Or worse, completely ignored.

Those fears are warranted. Many organizations do all of the hard work in branding, only for teams to continually dilute the messaging, the look, and the essence of the brand. Off-brand sub brands emerge, shortcuts are taken.

But the underlying assumption is that no team can subsequently revise what we've invested so much in creating. In the day to day of organizations, who has the time to dive as deep, do double up their diamonds. So how could we possibly expect others to significantly alter the brand?

Getting to know yourself

We've found that companies come to more refined understandings of themselves as they go. Short engagements from branding teams rely heavily on institutional knowledge, something the best design teams know well. But this corpus of company know-how is changing. With every marketing data point, every product launch, and the daily practice of internal design teams, companies build up a better sense of why they're working and what people value about them.

And, carefully, that can lead to updates in their brand expression.

New products, new services, new business units, new marketing campaigns, new audiences. Each one can lead to a considered update.

Amending infallible documents

If we think of our brand guidance as a religious text, inalterable and infallible, then we risk genuinely good insights from being lost. New campaigns are created well outside of brand guidelines. Messaging or accessibility documentation is created elsewhere, actively diverting traffic from the standards. Product teams create design systems because they find no place for product in the brand.

Instead, think of your brand guidelines as a set of laws. Laws can be added to, amended or removed. They can reflect our growing understanding of the organization.

And if you're for creating the kind of laws that evolve with your company? That's why we're here.