Five mistakes teams make with brand consistency

Every audit we run turns up some version of this. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit brand consistency.

Consistency is the quiet half of design work: it rarely gets complimented, and its absence is noticed immediately. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

Common failure modes

• Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
• Assuming someone else already owns it
• Consistency is what makes a small company look established
• Document the rules or they drift within a quarter
• Never checking whether the fix actually worked

Consistency is not sameness, it is predictability. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

Turning this into a decision

How to tell if yours is fine

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.