brand-guidelines

# Brand Guidelines ## Purpose Apply a brand consistently, and document it well enough that someone else can too. A brand that exists only in one designer's judgment is not a brand; it is a taste. ## When to Use - Applying an existing brand to new material. - Documenting a brand that has never been written down. - Auditing material for brand consistency. - Extracting a system from a set of existing assets. ## Capabilities - Extracting colour, type, spacing, and voice from existing assets. - Documenting a usable brand system. - Applying a brand across media. - Auditing for drift. ## Inputs - Existing brand assets, or a brand guideline document. - The material to be produced or audited. - The medium and its constraints. ## Outputs - A documented system: colour, type, spacing, imagery, voice. - Material that is on-brand and can be verified as such. - A list of the places the brand has drifted. ## Workflow 1. **Extract before inventing** — If a brand exists in assets but not in a document, derive it: sample the colours, identify the typefaces, measure the spacing, read the copy for voice. What is consistent across the assets is the brand; what varies is drift. 2. **Document the decisions, not just the values** — "Primary blue #2563EB, used for actions and links only. Never for large fills." The constraint is the useful part. 3. **Cover the cases people get wrong** — Minimum logo size, clear space, what to do on a dark background, what happens when the brand colour fail...