A practical checklist for brand consistency

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. Run through this the next time brand consistency comes up.

Design decisions are the ones clients feel most confident arguing about, which makes it worth separating taste from evidence early. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

The checklist

• Consistency is what makes a small company look established
• Document the rules or they drift within a quarter
• Consistency is not sameness, it is predictability
• Someone is named as the owner
• There is a date to review it again

What is actually at stake

Consistency is what makes a small company look established. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

The short version

The measurable part of design is whether people can find what they came for and act on it without hesitating. Three things worth confirming about brand consistency before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Document the rules or they drift within a quarter — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.