Brand guides as constitutions
The cost of treating brand guidelines as law before the brand has entered the real world.
What you can honestly document on day one, what you can’t, and why the extra pages cost you ideas.
The best brand guidelines I have ever seen were made by Koto Studio for Call of Duty, and they are absurd in the best way.
I tried finding them and it looks like they've been removed from the internet, which is a bummer. So you'll just have to take my word for it.
They had the typical stuff you would expect: typographic palette and logo constraints, but they took it a step further by providing ad spacing and motion guidelines as well with killer examples of each.
I've had founders ask for guidelines that were as thorough just after receiving a logo file. No website yet, no marketing assets yet, just a delivered logo, color palette, typefaces, and icons.
Sure, I could make a doc for them that includes specifics around ad spacing, media placements, etc, but there's a big element that they miss when looking at a doc like this:
The most interesting rules had to wait.
You cannot specify the spacing on an ad until somebody has built forty ads and watched which ones held up and which ones fell apart. That rule isn’t a decision, it’s an observation that was turned into a best-practice. The whole document is a record of work that already happened, written down afterward so nobody has to re-solve it every quarter.
Which is exactly backwards from how brand guidelines usually get delivered.
What you can honestly write on day one
Some things you genuinely do know the moment the identity lands, because the identity process is where they got decided and pressure-tested. Creative direction is set. The stylescape got approved. Everybody agreed on what the brand is actually made of.
Color. Typography. The logo and its lockups. Photo styling (maybe). These are elements you are confident will stay consistent, because they have already survived the only argument they were ever going to have.
That’s not an extensive brand guide, certainly not a 30-page doc.
What you cannot write on day one
Anything that starts with the word “how.”
How the elements get enacted, how they behave next to each other, how they hold up at 300 pixels wide and on a billboard and in the eleventh slide of a deck nobody proofread.
You have to develop the assets in order to understand how to use them. There is no shortcut around that, and no amount of thinking about it in advance substitutes for making the thing and forcing it to prove itself.
Every element has to be tested and proven on the battlefield, no pun intended.
And then there’s the rote half
The thing that all style guides include, which at this point just makes me sick to my stomach, are the basic rules that if a designer was to break in the first place would make me reconsider their competence.
Don’t stretch the logo. Don’t put the light mark on a light background. Blah, blah, blah. Basic stuff.
Fine. Write it. Just be honest that a good design team knew every word of it before they opened the file. Those pages aren’t guidance, they're a CYA in written form.
The real cost of the 140-page guide
The wasted hours are the cheap part, and it’s the part people argue about, because hours have an invoice attached and are therefore easy to see.
The expensive part is the idea that never made it to the table.
Somebody who understood and knew the brand has a great idea. It doesn't match the rules perfectly, so it dies in their head.
A great idea got trashed because it broke a rule written by someone who hadn’t made anything yet.
You want guidelines that were useful, specific, and genuinely necessary. What you get when you create them in a vacuum is a list of restraints that kill good ideas that extend a brand perfectly and waste time creating a document that will be irrelevant once rubber hits the pavement.
Brand guidelines should be a record of what survives in the real world, not a rulebook for what hasn’t happened yet. Document the proven things, and leave the rest of the pages blank until they can be backed up with evidence.
— Zach 😎
