What to ask your agency about brand consistency

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on brand consistency, these questions are worth asking early.

Design decisions are the ones clients feel most confident arguing about, which makes it worth separating taste from evidence early. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Consistency is what makes a small company look established. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

Consistency is not sameness, it is predictability. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

In practice

Consistency is the quiet half of design work: it rarely gets complimented, and its absence is noticed immediately. Three things worth confirming about brand consistency before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Consistency is not sameness, it is predictability — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.