The Ghost Brand Standards

I have worked on many a Brand Standards/Guidelines and it's fun and challenging to come up with rules that are tight enough you get consistency, yet loose enough to allow for interesting variation. Often, it comes down to who the standards are for – other designers, vendors, employees or influencers. You might need slightly different versions for each. And we're familiar with the general rules: don't use random colors, use this font, don't disproportionately scale anything, and so on. Before those rules are released into the wild, they are agreed-upon and approved by the client which is often multiple people.

But there is an officially unofficial brand standards, what I'm calling the Ghost Brand Standards. And these are specific likes or dislikes, typically more individualized, that function over and around the official standards. They are occasionally in conflict with the official standards. Somebody hates using the brand font in Bold. Somebody doesn't like using too much of the brand aqua. Another might have a preference for certain words or phrases.

And these are hard to keep up with. Now, you could simply amend the official standards. But that doesn't often happen because that would involve the whole group agreeing to make the change. And these are often individual preferences. You can try keeping a living document, but it can change so frequently as to become not very useful very fast. And these kinds of preferences are often applied inconsistently anyway. If the person who likes semicolons is on vacation, then that goes out the window. And as teams on the client side grow ever larger, more and more of these ghost standards accumulate.

So these are often kept via team knowledge. At the beginning of a job, I might hear something like, "The client is liking left-aligned type right now." As a designer, the most helpful thing to me, especially if it's a client I don't work on often is having a recent reference. For example, "They need a half page ad, and use Job 123 as your design reference." Job 123 being the most recent encapsulation of all the current brand idiosyncrasies. It's much quicker and more accurate than trying to reference a page of notes that is probably already outdated. The other issue arises when someone externally needs to create something. They may have the brand standards, but they will have no idea about all the little ghost standards.

It's tricky to keep up with these. But often the point is that someone wants their preference without wanting to get everyone together and agree on it at a team or corporate level. Getting the brand standards and all the rules and minutiae approved in the first place was a long process, so many folks don't want to poke that bear. My suggestion for a solution is to take the time (and, yes, money) to update your brand standards every couple years. At least audit it and have a discussion. If you plan on auditing your standards on a regular basis, just like you would other aspects of the business, then it doesn't become such a big, scary thing. If you want brand consistency it's really the only way.