Brand guidelines nobody opens

We used to deliver guidelines as a beautiful PDF of ninety pages. Six months later we would visit the client and find the PDF unopened, next to a sales deck made with the old logo.

Nobody reads rules on a deadline

The people who use a brand every day are rarely designers. They are a recruiter writing a job post at six in the evening, or a manager making slides for tomorrow morning. They do not need the story behind the typeface. They need the right file, fast.

We learned this the hard way at a bank we worked with. Their marketing team had a 120-page guide, and their branch staff had a folder of screenshots someone made in 2017. The screenshots won every time, because they were one click away.

What we ship now

Every brand we launch gets a small website in place of the PDF. It opens on a search bar. Type logo and you get the files. Type job post and you get a template with the right fonts already in it.

1. A download page with every logo, colour code and font licence.
2. Templates for the ten documents the team makes most often.
3. One page of rules, with a do and a don't for each one.
4. A named person to ask, with a photo and an email address.

The site takes us about a week to build and costs less than printing the old PDF. It also stays current: when a client changes a phone number or adds a product, they edit one page and every template follows.

For Nord Rail we built forty job ad templates before we wrote a single rule. Recruiters used them from the first week, and the rules page gets about ten visits a month. We are fine with that, because the templates do the work the rules were meant to do.