The Sistine Chapel wasn’t designed in a day. So why should you treat your brand any differently?
Okay, so you’ve got your colours, got your fonts, got your logo – yet your brand feels… off. Why?
While all those elements work towards a cohesive brand, they often just cover up a larger issue. A good brand doesn’t just look pretty, it needs to function consistently on different marketing pieces, at different sizes, growing and shrinking as your business does. This is where a brand system enters the conversation.
Rather than treating branding as a collection of nice-looking assets, a brand system treats it as a structured framework that helps businesses operate more clearly, communicate more consistently, and grow without unnecessary friction.
So, How Do Brand Systems Create Consistency?
In its purest form, brand systems are future-proofing. It’s creating strict guidelines to act as insurance against anyone new using your brand. With clear rules in place from the outset, there’s very little room for error. This means it doesn’t matter if it’s the 16 year old work experience kid, or the 65 year old CEO, if they follow the guidelines, the brand will be the same.
How does this actually work in action? Well, without going into painstaking detail, here’s a few examples rules your brand system might follow:
- Your logo is always placed in the top left corner of a document, at precisely 1/8th the size of the page.
- Headings always use sentence case, to appear more relaxed and conversational.
- Your filmed social media content always ends with a fade to black, taking exactly 0.5 seconds.
As you’ve probably noticed, all of the examples are starkly different. The system isn’t just about what colours you use. It’s, without sounding dramatic, everything.
What Happens When the System Is Missing?
The ramifications of not implementing a solid brand system really depend on your size, complexity, and industry. But in layman’s terms: it means more work and a sloppier market perception.
For smaller businesses, weak branding often shows up as founders approving everything. Every social caption, every advertisement, every piece of communication. It’s endless signing off. And more importantly, it’s wasting everyone’s time.
For larger organisations, it appears as marketing teams fielding endless questions from multiple departments or offices, often inundated with extra work that could easily be avoidable if there were just some damn rules in place.
For businesses at any scale, decisions have to be made and remade every single time a new piece of marketing is created. How do we want the copy to sound? What should the layout look like? How should we format our website URL? Yes, they’re all little decisions. But we all know little decisions add up over time.
How Can I Create My Own Branding System?
The obvious (and quite frankly, salesy) choice is to just use the contact form below and get us to help you. But it might not be time for your brand to undergo any significant work. So here’s a few tips and tricks to consider to immediately get some consistency into your brand.
When considering your brand’s visuals, define the following questions:
- Where does your logo sit, and at what size do you use it at?
- What is the purpose and use of each colour in your brand?
- When and where do you use each brand font and weight?
- Are there common types of layouts your brand uses?
Similarly, ask yourself these questions to create a system for your brand’s voice:
- How does your copy sound from piece to piece?
- What are your capitalisation rules?
- Do you write numbers alphabetically or numerically?
- Can you create some consistent messaging your brand can be known for?
While this is just the tip of the iceberg, spending some time to cement answers to these questions are going to help in the long run. Think more consistency, less friction, and a strong brand presence. How good!