When brand consistency is worth the effort

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. Brand consistency is not free, and pretending otherwise leads to bad decisions.

The measurable part of design is whether people can find what they came for and act on it without hesitating. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

When it is worth it

Consistency is what makes a small company look established. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

When it is not

If nothing downstream depends on it and nobody is complaining, it can wait. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped.

How to decide

Consistency is not sameness, it is predictability. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

How to tell if yours is fine

Design decisions are the ones clients feel most confident arguing about, which makes it worth separating taste from evidence early. 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 what makes a small company look established — 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.