Branding: Consistent Application

Any design agency worth its salt will bang on about the importance of being consistent on how a brand or corporate identity is applied.

It is important. Here’s why.

If you have a good identity and brand in place, the one surefire way of weakening the impact and recognition is to implement it inconsistently. If you don’t police your identity’s application, you might as well flush all your branding work down the toilet.

Even if you have a style guide, it will mean nothing unless the guidelines are followed. 

Why is consistency important?

This should sound like a stupid question, and it is. But in nearly 24 years of running Navig8, even the strongest marketeers and brand managers I have worked with can still tend to make exceptions with the brand and its consistent application can be compromised.

This happens a lot when applying the design to digital assets. 

The reason for this (and in some ways, this applies to large formats) is that in the case of social media formats, the channels can be extreme. They demand legibility in a variety of formats, viewed on a phone or on a website. Very few guidelines accommodate these diverse renderings. I cannot count the times I have seen a social media post, within a client’s own social media channel, that includes their own logo. That’s not necessary, the channel has the branding; the post does not need to include the logo.

Why is it difficult to manage?

Managing consistency is difficult because things change over time and formats vary so much. I’ll give you an example; a client of Navig8’s has an aged brand scheme developed for print, specifically A4 portrait documents. As we drag them kicking and screaming into the world of digital design, the scheme doesn't lend itself to landscape formats and the ability to crop images effectively in their brand shapes. 

The client keeps pointing us to the style guide, but the guidelines don’t accommodate this new approach to a more digitally focused set of assets. 

It is our job to flex the brand and make it work within guidelines – if they allow a certain amount of flex.

One of our clients has a formula to calculate the size and position of their logo. This is very admirable if not a little complex. But it falls when applied to social media assets or large format print. The logo is either ridiculously too small or humongously too big.

A designer needs to take a sensible view and make measured, defensible decisions. Once an exception to the brand guidelines has been established, it should be documented, agreed with the brand team and become the new standard.

The other issue we commonly come across is clients commissioning external (off-roster) agencies or freelancers (sometimes abroad) who often have different views on how to apply the identity that the brand team may not agree with, or even see (because the final asset may be delivered in another country).

When is it done well?

A consistent approach is vital for brand recognition – it should not be underestimated. But if the guidelines are too restrictive, paradoxically, they make applying a brand consistently more difficult.

What! Wait! But you said… let me explain.

If there isn’t a certain amount of flex in them, then in some of those more ‘extreme’ formats, for instance, social media posts on a phone, people will do stupid things to get around the problem. This is particularly a problem when the guidelines restrict font sizes or logo sizes too rigidly.

There should be a continual development of brand guidelines, they should be in a constant state of review and update. 

The days of updating a PDF style guide should be behind us. Most organisations have moved onto online, digital style guides.

Online style guides make them easy to update, but difficult to disseminate. Even the most diligent agency (which we are, of course) will struggle to spot an editorial change in what can be a massive style guide.

And yet, I have never had an alert from a client when a style guide has been updated. This means the onus is on the agency to check the style guide’s relevant sections when beginning every design commission. We don’t get any fees for that, we are not lawyers after all; the only industry I know that has managed to make it ‘acceptable’ to charge for sending an email. 

Brand managers in their role as ‘LogoCop’ need to police brand application in a human, real-world way and be consistent in their instructions. Often they are not.

We are often told we must follow the brand guidelines without exception. That is until the marketing manager decides, on this occasion, it’s ok to break style.