Why Brand Guidelines Fail After Handoff
TL;DR: Brand guidelines are a 20th century solution facing 21st-century problems. Brand designers struggle to keep brand identities coherent, while managing endless review queues. Marketers need faster approvals. Designers pour their hearts into crafting perfect brand guidelines—sweating over every pixel, hunting down the perfect shade, selecting every frame to tell the story—but teams move too quickly in order to read them. Keeping a business’s design process on brand requires businesses to move away from reactive, manual enforcement to proactive, brand-driven tools for asset creation.
In a past life, I co-founded an agency called Character. We designed brand guidelines in collaboration with all sorts of clients, from early stage startups still finding their voice to global tech enterprises like Apple. At the end of each project, after the celebratory handoff, I noticed a pattern that bothered me.
After an agency handed off brand guidelines to the client, execution inevitably started drifting and, eventually, deteriorating.
It felt difficult to put my finger on where exactly things started going wrong, because the problem wasn’t so simple. Nobody was at fault. Rather, things have just changed since brand guidelines were officially introduced into the world just a few decades ago.
In my mind, the seminal moment in this tradition was Paul Rand’s brand identity work with IBM that started in the 1950s. In order to enable IBM’s designers to work with the identity, Rand published a nearly 300-page print manual showing how to apply IBM's identity to business cards, posters, ads, and machines. It’s an iconic document, one you can still order reprints of to this day.
There are many beautiful brand guidelines available today, each an expression of graphic design expertise and effort, made public on the internet. Brand designers and marketers, rightfully, celebrate them. It’s energizing to have a conversation about what your favorite publicly available brand guidelines are. We admire the craft, the systems, and the vision embedded in these documents.
What’s less talked about, and arguably more important, takes place after agency designers hand off brand guidelines to clients for implementation.
Brand guidelines are rules
Brand guidelines exist to help keep a brand identity consistent. They are essentially rules, and rules only work when they are supported by a system.
Most guidelines are created by designers to protect the work, and to ensure the brand can be applied consistently by people beyond the design team. At Character, we delivered hundreds of them. We even used a platform that hosted the brand guidelines online, and we could see the analytics: once the guidelines were published, they were rarely referenced.
That’s because brand designers have, even before handoff, contributed to and referenced the brand guidelines so much they know the rules by heart. Guidelines really exist for everyone else on the team, including marketers, contractors, new hires, regional teams.
As production ramps up, the burden of enforcement shifts back to the brand designer through reviews, approvals, and constant correction. A company pushing out dozens of assets daily can’t possibly have a designer review each one in time, so the managers accept that some will slip through. The brand design review backlog inevitably builds up.
This process, which fundamentally hasn’t changed much from the 1950s, takes the reactive approach to implementing brand guidelines. The process is manual and menial. It requires constant human judgment. Every asset becomes a guessing game: did we follow the rules correctly? Is the asset on brand?
Guidelines, as they are delivered today, are also static. When businesses pivot, as they tend to, guidelines can’t evolve fast enough to reflect new strategy. Teams move much faster than before, which requires a new way to incorporate brand guidelines into the production process.
This arrangement worked when there were few assets being produced and mass broadcasted; now, there are many assets being produced, each appealing to a segment of customers.
At high speed, this approach quickly creates a bottleneck. A friend and former client of mine, a CMO at a high performing tech company, expressed his exasperation to me, in more colorful language than I’m recalling:
“I can’t wait two weeks for a designer to create a banner ad! My team needs to push content constantly, test it, and iterate. If I have to wait, I’m going to Canva and making it myself.”
Brand guidelines sit beside graphic design tools, as a document outside of them. My CMO friend didn’t have time to check the guidelines. In order for them to be effective, brand guidelines need to be embedded into the tools.
High speed and scale require new approaches
Companies don’t just need to move faster, they need to do so while maintaining their scale as well. A useful metaphor comes to mind: consider Florence, a city you could walk through entirely in forty minutes. By contrast, Tokyo is a megalopolis; in order to get around, you’ll need to ride the subway, the Shinkansen, the buses, or the taxis.
While the infrastructure is complex, Tokyo’s transportation system enables millions of people to move through every day, at a speed and scale that Florence never could.
In an essay on the future of work, Ivan Zhao (co-founder and CEO of Notion) introduces the metaphor of these two cities to describe how organizations need to evolve as they scale. He argues that most companies are still operating like Florence, relying on human-powered coordination. However, as they scale, they need infrastructure that works at Tokyo's scale.
You can extend this principle directly to how brands operate. A brand guideline, today, is the equivalent to a map of how to walk through a city; it’s not a subway. Adding more designers, more approvals, and more documentation just adds to the clutter, the same way adding more pedestrians and rules to a city’s walkways would.
As companies grow, they would be well served approaching their systems more like Tokyo’s transportation system. Instead of building better walking maps—brand guidelines—they need to consider the underlying infrastructure—building the metaphorical equivalent to subway systems and introducing cars. These approaches require a different way of thinking about how work gets coordinated.
Brand guidelines will bear less resemblance to documents, and start to look more like infrastructure. Instead of being a beautiful list of rules, they’ll become very useful tools.
Brand guidelines can become tools for designers and marketers
Imagine a system where the brand guidelines are embedded into the creation process itself. If a color palette is defined, selecting a color automatically pulls in the correct accent colors and approved pairings. If the tone of voice is defined as, “optimistic but realistic,” writing suggestions are flagged in real time. If a logo can’t be used in certain ways, the tool prevents you from using it that way in the first place.
The system knows what’s approved and what’s not, and makes the right choice the default. It enables the entire team—designers, marketers, and the rest of the departments—to take a proactive approach to brand guidelines.
A brand is an outward expression of an organization’s culture. As much as it reflects leadership vision from the top, it also embodies how individual contributors work and think.
When a brand becomes this kind of shared operating system—when everyone from the CEO to the newest designer understands and embodies it—the brand can also evolve more dynamically.
As cultural moments happen, leadership urges the brand to be more human, more urgent, more optimistic. Instead of waiting weeks for a redesign cycle, the brand can adapt immediately. The system translates that shift into new tools that adhere to new rules, new color palettes, and new tone of voice.
Everyone across the organization feels that momentum and reflects it in their work. The brand can move with culture, not months behind it.
In this possible future, brand designers return to what they've always been: storytellers.
Instead of reviewing production work, designers help refine the system. They set rules, teaching the system what “on brand” actually means, then monitoring for edge cases. There’s much less need for designers to do brand reviews; they are free to explore more directions, test more approaches, and iterate on the brand's story as culture shifts.
Marketers are also free to test quickly, and every team can produce assets without needing to second guess if they are on brand; the system would ensure it. Brand designers wouldn’t need to manually review and verify; the system would flag elements that feel off brand.
The shift from reactive to proactive is ultimately a shift from rules to tools. And for designers, it creates an opportunity to focus on creative direction, learning and sharing new insights, and more strategic projects.