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Deep dives into design thinking, creative process, and the intersection of business and aesthetics.
Brand consistency is an operations problem wearing a design costume.
A company commissions a rebrand, and some months later a handsome set of brand guidelines arrives. It runs to eighty pages, with exclusion zones, a tone-of-voice section, tables of hex values and a page on the thinking behind the logotype. Everyone agrees it's lovely, and it goes into a shared drive.
Within a year the sales team is building decks in whatever typeface came installed on their laptops. A recruitment ad has gone out with a stretched logo. Someone in operations has invented a second shade of the primary colour because they couldn't find the right one quickly enough, and a supplier who asked for the logo was sent different files by different people.
Nobody was careless. The system asked people to do extra work to stay consistent, and people on a deadline don't do extra work. Most of what follows is about fixing that, and very little of it is design.
Brand guidelines fail for reasons that have little to do with how they look
A PDF is a reference. It tells someone what the correct colour is, but it doesn't put that colour in their hands at the moment they need it, and consistency gets lost somewhere between knowing and doing.
Most guidelines are also written for designers, while most of the branded material a company produces day to day comes from sales, HR, operations and whoever is doing the newsletter this month. Those people aren't going to read a page on optical alignment, and they shouldn't have to.
Guidelines record decisions that have already been made, which is useful up to a point, but they rarely help with the case nobody anticipated, like a pull-up banner for a trade stand or a letter co-branded with a partner organisation.
And nobody owns them. Once the agency has finished and the marketing lead who commissioned the work has moved on, the document has no custodian and no way of being updated.
You'll see it in the admin before you see it in the design
You don't need an audit to know whether this has happened to you. Someone asks in a group chat where the logo is. New staff rebuild templates that already exist, because finding the originals was harder than starting again. The buttons on the website are one blue and the proposal template is another. Put material from two departments side by side and you could believe it came from two companies.
Each of these is a small cost. Added up, it's a lot of paid time spent winning back ground you'd already bought.
If you want a quick read on where you stand, ask someone outside marketing to send you the logo, the brand typeface and the current proposal template. Notice how long it takes, and whether what comes back is right.
Hand the brand out instead of describing it
What works is making the consistent choice the quickest one for someone under pressure, so that discipline doesn't come into it. That means putting the brand into the files people already open.
Give people templates to start from: a locked presentation deck, report and letter templates, social formats and an email signature. The right choices should already be made by the time anyone opens the file, and a template prevents more inconsistency than any written rule.
Put every asset behind one link: logos in every format anyone will realistically ask for, the fonts with their licence terms, approved imagery and a short note on which logo goes where. If fetching an asset takes longer than recreating it badly, people will recreate it badly.
Define colour and type inside the tools themselves, in the website's stylesheet and in the document and presentation templates, so nobody is copying values from a list. A value typed from memory will eventually be typed wrong.
Keep the written rules to a couple of pages, in plain language, covering the decisions people most often get wrong. Tone of voice belongs in there, all the more if anyone is drafting copy with AI. The designer's edge cases can live somewhere else.
Governance without an approval queue
Most organisations resist brand governance because they picture an approval queue, and approval queues tend to collapse under their own weight anyway. What's needed is much smaller.
Name one person who owns the assets. They should be able to answer a question within a day and decide on exceptions, because without a route for exceptions people quietly invent their own solutions. Then, once a quarter, look at what has actually been produced. It shouldn't take long, and it will tell you more than any policy document.
A better test of a brand system than whether anyone has read the guidelines is how long it takes a new employee to produce something correct without asking a colleague.
Recognition is the weakest argument for consistency
Consistency usually gets defended on the grounds of recognition. That's true, but it's abstract enough to lose a budget argument, and the practical case is stronger.
Work that starts from a template is quicker than work that starts from a blank page, and the saving repeats with every proposal and job advert. When the standard is built into the files, there's also much less to correct afterwards, so rounds of revisions get shorter.
Then there's the money already spent. The rebrand was an investment, and letting it wear away over a year or two writes part of it off through neglect.
And in a considered purchase, buyers read inconsistency as disorganisation. It's an unfair inference, but a dependable one. A proposal in the wrong typeface sitting beside a polished website tells a procurement manager something about how you'll run their project.
If the brand was designed well and the trouble is in how it's used, book a call with Dave. We'll look at how the brand files reach the people who use them, and where that's breaking down.
Related Brainstorm services and work
Branding and identity in Ireland · Brand strategy and positioning · Selected brand and website work
Updated 24 September 2026. Dave Curtin, founder and Creative Director of Brainstorm, leads website strategy, brand direction and technical delivery for Brainstorm clients.
Brand consistency is an operations problem wearing a design costume.
A company commissions a rebrand, and some months later a handsome set of brand guidelines arrives. It runs to eighty pages, with exclusion zones, a tone-of-voice section, tables of hex values and a page on the thinking behind the logotype. Everyone agrees it's lovely, and it goes into a shared drive.
Within a year the sales team is building decks in whatever typeface came installed on their laptops. A recruitment ad has gone out with a stretched logo. Someone in operations has invented a second shade of the primary colour because they couldn't find the right one quickly enough, and a supplier who asked for the logo was sent different files by different people.
Nobody was careless. The system asked people to do extra work to stay consistent, and people on a deadline don't do extra work. Most of what follows is about fixing that, and very little of it is design.
Brand guidelines fail for reasons that have little to do with how they look
A PDF is a reference. It tells someone what the correct colour is, but it doesn't put that colour in their hands at the moment they need it, and consistency gets lost somewhere between knowing and doing.
Most guidelines are also written for designers, while most of the branded material a company produces day to day comes from sales, HR, operations and whoever is doing the newsletter this month. Those people aren't going to read a page on optical alignment, and they shouldn't have to.
Guidelines record decisions that have already been made, which is useful up to a point, but they rarely help with the case nobody anticipated, like a pull-up banner for a trade stand or a letter co-branded with a partner organisation.
And nobody owns them. Once the agency has finished and the marketing lead who commissioned the work has moved on, the document has no custodian and no way of being updated.
You'll see it in the admin before you see it in the design
You don't need an audit to know whether this has happened to you. Someone asks in a group chat where the logo is. New staff rebuild templates that already exist, because finding the originals was harder than starting again. The buttons on the website are one blue and the proposal template is another. Put material from two departments side by side and you could believe it came from two companies.
Each of these is a small cost. Added up, it's a lot of paid time spent winning back ground you'd already bought.
If you want a quick read on where you stand, ask someone outside marketing to send you the logo, the brand typeface and the current proposal template. Notice how long it takes, and whether what comes back is right.
Hand the brand out instead of describing it
What works is making the consistent choice the quickest one for someone under pressure, so that discipline doesn't come into it. That means putting the brand into the files people already open.
Give people templates to start from: a locked presentation deck, report and letter templates, social formats and an email signature. The right choices should already be made by the time anyone opens the file, and a template prevents more inconsistency than any written rule.
Put every asset behind one link: logos in every format anyone will realistically ask for, the fonts with their licence terms, approved imagery and a short note on which logo goes where. If fetching an asset takes longer than recreating it badly, people will recreate it badly.
Define colour and type inside the tools themselves, in the website's stylesheet and in the document and presentation templates, so nobody is copying values from a list. A value typed from memory will eventually be typed wrong.
Keep the written rules to a couple of pages, in plain language, covering the decisions people most often get wrong. Tone of voice belongs in there, all the more if anyone is drafting copy with AI. The designer's edge cases can live somewhere else.
Governance without an approval queue
Most organisations resist brand governance because they picture an approval queue, and approval queues tend to collapse under their own weight anyway. What's needed is much smaller.
Name one person who owns the assets. They should be able to answer a question within a day and decide on exceptions, because without a route for exceptions people quietly invent their own solutions. Then, once a quarter, look at what has actually been produced. It shouldn't take long, and it will tell you more than any policy document.
A better test of a brand system than whether anyone has read the guidelines is how long it takes a new employee to produce something correct without asking a colleague.
Recognition is the weakest argument for consistency
Consistency usually gets defended on the grounds of recognition. That's true, but it's abstract enough to lose a budget argument, and the practical case is stronger.
Work that starts from a template is quicker than work that starts from a blank page, and the saving repeats with every proposal and job advert. When the standard is built into the files, there's also much less to correct afterwards, so rounds of revisions get shorter.
Then there's the money already spent. The rebrand was an investment, and letting it wear away over a year or two writes part of it off through neglect.
And in a considered purchase, buyers read inconsistency as disorganisation. It's an unfair inference, but a dependable one. A proposal in the wrong typeface sitting beside a polished website tells a procurement manager something about how you'll run their project.
If the brand was designed well and the trouble is in how it's used, book a call with Dave. We'll look at how the brand files reach the people who use them, and where that's breaking down.
Related Brainstorm services and work
Branding and identity in Ireland · Brand strategy and positioning · Selected brand and website work
Updated 24 September 2026. Dave Curtin, founder and Creative Director of Brainstorm, leads website strategy, brand direction and technical delivery for Brainstorm clients.