Brand consistency is usually framed as an aesthetic concern – a matter of making things look right, of keeping the logo the same size, of using the correct shade of blue. That framing undersells the problem considerably.
Inconsistency isn’t just visually untidy. It’s operationally expensive, and it compounds over time in ways that become harder to reverse the longer they go unaddressed.
How brand drift starts
It almost never starts with a decision to do things differently. It starts with a workaround.
The brand font isn’t available in Word, so someone uses Calibri. The approved colour palette doesn’t include a dark enough option for a printed background, so someone picks something close. The PowerPoint template doesn’t have a slide layout for the thing that’s needed, so someone builds one – and it’s slightly off. The logo file that gets emailed around is a low-resolution version someone grabbed from an old presentation, not the master file, and nobody notices until it’s already been used in a printed piece.
Each of these decisions, individually, is small. The person making them is trying to get the job done. They’re not making a choice to undermine the brand – they’re solving an immediate problem with the tools available.
But the decisions accumulate. Six months later, the organisation has five different versions of its document templates in use across different teams. A year later, printed materials and digital materials use slightly different colour values. Two years later, a new member of staff joins and learns the brand by looking at what exists – which means learning the inconsistencies as well as the standards.
This is brand drift. It’s not dramatic. It doesn’t happen because of bad intentions. It happens because the brand system didn’t anticipate how people would actually need to use it.
What inconsistency actually costs
Time. Every time a document is produced that doesn’t match brand standards, someone eventually has to fix it – either before it goes out, or by explaining why it looks wrong after it’s been seen. Design corrections, resizing, colour fixes, font replacements: these are hours of work that could have been avoided with a well-built template. Across an organisation producing regular communications, this adds up to a significant amount of time spent on rework that shouldn’t have been necessary.
Credibility. A research organisation that sends a funder a proposal where the document looks different from the last one they sent, or where the fonts shift mid-document, or where the colours are noticeably off, signals disorganisation – even if the content is excellent. The reader may not consciously identify what’s wrong. But they’ll notice that something isn’t quite right, and that impression affects how the content is received.
Institutional knowledge. When brand standards aren’t documented – or aren’t documented clearly enough to be usable – they live in individual people’s heads. When those people leave, the knowledge goes with them. The organisation is left with a set of materials in various states of consistency, and no reliable way to return to a baseline.
Compounding errors. The version of the logo that was slightly wrong gets used in a document. That document gets used as a reference by someone else building the next document. The error compounds. By the time someone spots it, correcting it means finding every place it was used – which is rarely straightforward.
The templates problem
The single highest-leverage thing most organisations can do to reduce brand drift is to build better templates.
Not more templates – better ones. Templates that cover the actual range of documents the organisation produces. Templates that are designed properly, with correct fonts, colours, margins and layout logic built in. Templates that make it easier to do the right thing than to improvise.
Most organisations have templates. Most of those templates have problems: they weren’t designed with the full brand in mind, or they were designed years ago and haven’t been updated, or they cover some document types but not others, or they’re technically correct but practically awkward to use – so people work around them.
A template that people work around isn’t really a template. It’s a suggestion.
The design decisions that determine whether a template actually gets used – whether it covers the layouts people need, whether the fonts and colours are correctly embedded, whether it’s easy to apply consistently – are exactly the same decisions that determine whether the brand holds together across an organisation’s output. I’ve written about what happens when typography goes wrong in the first article in this series, and what happens when colour isn’t properly specified in the second.
The guidelines problem
Most organisations that have brand guidelines have one of two problems with them.
The first: the guidelines are too high-level. They specify the logo, the colours, the typeface – and then stop. They don’t say what to do with a long-form document, or a presentation, or a one-pager, or a social media graphic, or a report cover. So those things get produced without guidance, which means they get produced inconsistently.
The second: the guidelines are comprehensive but inaccessible. Forty-page brand books that no one opens. Guidelines written for a designer, not for the person actually producing the document on a Tuesday afternoon. The information is there, but it’s not in a form people can use when they need it.
Good brand guidelines for an organisation that produces regular communications should cover the formats those communications actually take. They should be specific enough to answer the questions that come up in practice – “what font size for a report subtitle?”, “which logo version for a dark background?”, “what’s the correct spacing above a section heading?” – and they should be short enough that someone will read them.
Boring is the wrong word for it
Consistency gets called boring because it’s associated with repetition, with sameness, with not doing anything interesting. That’s a misunderstanding of what it actually is.
Consistency is what allows the interesting things to land. A consistent brand system is the thing that makes individual pieces of work feel like they come from the same place – from an organisation with a coherent identity and a clear sense of how it presents itself. That coherence creates trust. Trust creates credibility. Credibility is what allows the work to do what it’s supposed to do.
Inconsistency doesn’t create interest. It creates noise. And in organisations that are trying to communicate complex research, make a case for funding, or establish authority in a field, noise is the last thing that’s needed.
If your brand has drifted – if you’re seeing multiple versions of templates in use, colours that vary between materials, documents that don’t quite look like they come from the same place – get in touch to talk about a brand system review.
