Brand consistency for small teams

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. Most advice about brand consistency assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

The measurable part of design is whether people can find what they came for and act on it without hesitating. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

What to keep

Consistency is what makes a small company look established. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge.

How we handle it

Consistency is not sameness, it is predictability. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

What this looks like day to day

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
• 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

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.