Brand Core · Brand Identity · Module
Consistency
How the system is actually held: where the assets live, who can approve a departure, and how often real output is checked against the intent.
The idea
How it works
Most inconsistency is not defiance. It is somebody who could not find the right file, or needed something at four o’clock that the system did not cover, and it is fixed by availability rather than by enforcement.
Consistency is worth auditing because the drift is invisible incrementally. Each individual departure is defensible; the accumulated set is a different brand.
Working with it
In practice
- 01
Make the correct route the easiest one
If the on-brand asset is harder to obtain than an approximation, approximations will be produced.
- 02
Give departures a route
A system with no exception process gets exceptions anyway, taken by whoever is in a hurry.
- 03
Audit output, not guidelines
Collect what was actually published last quarter and look at it together. It rarely resembles the intent.
- 04
Fix the guideline when it keeps being broken
A rule broken by everyone is a rule that does not work, not a training problem.
One level in
The components of consistency
A component is something that exists afterwards which did not exist before — a deliverable or a mechanism, not an intention.
A rule broken by everyone is a rule that does not work. Fix the guideline rather than the people.
The other modules in brand identity
Brand personality
The traits the brand behaves as if it had — chosen deliberately, with things it is explicitly not, because that is what governs the judgement calls no guideline covers.
LearnVisual system
Logo, colour, typography, imagery and layout — specified precisely enough to be reproduced by someone who has never spoken to anyone about it.
LearnVerbal system
Name, tone of voice, vocabulary and how things are named beneath the brand — the half of identity that is used most and documented least.
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