A brand system you can actually maintain

Most brand guidelines are written for the designer who made them. They are long, beautiful and full of rules. The people who need them most, the team using the brand every day, rarely open them.

After a few years of handing over sixty-page PDFs and watching them disappear, I changed how I build brand systems. They are smaller now, and they get used.

Start with decisions, not rules

A good system answers the questions the team will actually ask. Which logo goes on a dark photo? Which colour do we use for a warning? How big should a heading be in a slide deck? If the guide cannot answer those in ten seconds, it will not be used.

So before I design anything, I collect those questions. I ask the team what they make every week, what they get wrong and what they ask the founder about. That list becomes the table of contents.

A brand system is only as good as the last thing the team made with it.

Keep it to one page if you can

If a rule needs a paragraph, it probably needs a template instead. Nobody wants to read about spacing. They want a slide, a social post or a letterhead that is already right.

What goes on the page

• The logo, and the two or three ways it may be used

• Four to six colours, each with a job

• Two typefaces and the sizes for headings and text

• Links to the templates the team uses most

What does not

Mood boards, brand stories and long explanations of why the colour is blue. Those belong in the presentation where the brand is sold, not in the tool the team uses to work.

Make templates do the heavy lifting

Every handover now includes the templates the team will reach for first: a social post, a slide deck, an email signature and a one-page document. When the right thing is the easiest thing, people do it without being told.

Six months later, I check in. What did the team make? What did they change? The answers go into the next version of the system, and the guide stays small because it keeps being edited.