A brand is not delivered at a handover meeting. It is delivered the first time somebody who was not in the room makes something with it — and that is usually a week later, in a hurry, without asking anyone.
This is the checklist we run before we hand anything over. It is deliberately unglamorous. None of these items are design decisions. All of them are the difference between a brand that holds and one that quietly dissolves.
The mark
- Primary logo is what appears first, everywhere
- Stacked, symbol-only and reversed variants all exist and are used correctly
- Minimum sizes are specified in real units — px for screen, mm for print
- Clear space is drawn, not just described
- One-colour and reversed versions exist for single-colour printing
- Misuse examples are documented somewhere people will see them
- The mark is not stretched, recoloured, rotated, outlined or dropped into a busy photo
- The mark is legible at favicon size — actually tested, not assumed
Colour
- Every colour has a hex, an RGB and a CMYK value
- Colours are named consistently — there is one name per colour, used the same way by everyone
- Primary, secondary, accent and neutrals are defined by role
- Semantic colours exist for success, warning and error
- Text and background pairings have been contrast-checked, and the results written down
- No text relies on colour alone to carry meaning
- A colour exists for the state of every interactive element, including hover, focus, active and disabled
- Print colours are specified and checked on the stock you actually use
Typography
- The typefaces are named, and where the licence came from is recorded
- Weights available are listed, and which ones are safe to use are noted
- A type scale exists with sizes and line heights
- Headings, body and captions are defined, and each has an example
- The fallback for web and for print is documented
- Long-form reading settings are specified — measure, leading, paragraph spacing
- There is an answer for what happens when the heading does not fit
Voice
- Three or four voice principles, each with a real before-and-after example
- How the brand sounds in a crisis, and how it sounds when saying no
- Words we never use, and words we always use
- How the brand addresses the reader — you, we, or they
- Capitalisation and punctuation conventions, especially for headings
- A note on length — what we say in a sentence, what we never say in a headline
Application
- Real examples exist for the assets the business actually produces
- The business card, the email signature, the slide, the social post
- Templates are provided in the format the team actually uses
- Photo and illustration principles include examples and anti-examples
- Iconography exists, or has been ruled out with a reason
- Layout principles exist: grid, margins, alignment, spacing
- The dark-mode or reversed variant has been decided, not left to chance
Files
- Source artwork is organised, named consistently and in a predictable folder structure
- Every file format the team needs is present — SVG, PNG, JPG, PDF
- Exports exist for the sizes that get used: social, favicon, print
- Fonts are licensed correctly, and the licence terms are recorded
- There is a single canonical version of the logo, clearly marked
- Somebody other than the designer can find the right file without asking
- Ownership and licensing terms are documented in writing
The final test
Files are organised and the documentation is complete. Now the real check.
Hand the entire kit to someone who has never seen the brand before, with a brief, and ask them to produce one real application — a social post, an email header, a slide. Do not give instructions. Do not help.
Then look at what they made.
- If it is recognisably the brand, the system works.
- If it is vaguely right but off, something is underspecified.
- If it looks like a different company, you have given them a colour palette and called it a brand.
This test takes an afternoon and it catches more real problems than any amount of internal review, because internal review suffers from the curse of knowledge. Everyone on the project knows what the brand is supposed to look like. Nobody outside it does.
How often to run it
At handover. Always, using the checklist above.
Every six months. We do this as part of Brand care. It is the point at which a colour has quietly drifted on the website, a template has been edited into something else, and a new hire has started making things from memory rather than from the files.
After any material change. A new sub-brand, a rebrand of one department, a new market. Consistency is not a one-off achievement; it is a thing you maintain or lose.
The bit that matters most
Almost every consistency problem we are asked to fix started the same way: not with a designer doing something wrong, but with a designer doing something reasonable without being able to check.
They needed a Facebook cover image. The guidelines did not cover it. They made a sensible decision, and now there are three cover image styles.
The remedy is not a stricter guide. It is making the right thing the easy thing — which usually means more templates, not more rules. A template that is faster to use than a blank canvas will be used correctly. A rule that has to be remembered will be forgotten.
That is why the file and template sections are the ones we treat as core, not as an afterthought. The guidelines are a document. The templates are the actual brand.
The full checklist above is what we run before handover on every branding project. If you want the template version, the brand positioning playbook includes a brand consistency checklist you can run yourself — and it works with any designer, including one you already have.
