Brand tools, not guidelines

Spoken words only - one hook counted, captions and notes excluded, at 130 wpm.

Hook

• You ever feel like the way we do branding just doesn't work anymore? I have. After 15 years in this game.
• Seriously, throw the brand book out the window. Let's talk about what actually works now.
• I've made a living writing brand guidelines. Honestly? I can't see myself making many more.
• This isn't another dusty old guideline. It's a brand tool, something you'll actually use.

Body

AI is really messing with branding, but probably not the way you're thinking of.

It's easier than ever to create content, and the tech is moving so fast, creating a brand identity has inherited that pace.

What that also means is the expectation to create a polished identity needs to be in the same timeframe.

What we're now seeing is small individuals and small teams being able to produce brands and brand identities in weeks, not months.

I'm not saying that this is a good thing. However, people are doing this, so it's going to become a very common practice.

We're seeing founders that don't have a background in brand strategy or design, capable of producing a brand the way they want, and I'm all for it.

But you know how it goes. Suddenly ten people are all making stuff, and before you know it, everything just stops feeling like one brand.

Traditionally, our guidelines live in a 60-page PDF. We export all of our logo files and fonts and graphic elements into a folder in Dropbox.

Almost every time, they end up getting lost, and old versions creep in. There still hasn't been a perfect solution yet.

So here's my take on how I think brands will be managed in the near future.

The best of us have definitely moved on from a PDF, and sometimes that has just been slapping things onto a web page to make things a bit more accessible for the team.

But my thoughts are we're gonna start seeing a lot more brand tools to help us manage our brand and experiment and create assets, and these won't just be for designers. These will be tools for everyone.

A tool that just spits out your logo in the right size, the right colour, the right format, wherever you need it.

A tool that does your type hierarchy for you, so scale and contrast aren't things you have to stress about.

A tool that grabs the right icon set for whatever screen it's going to.

The way I see things, creating a brand is definitely going to be a lot more streamlined and easier, but the demand for content to stay on brand at such a fast pace is going to be a lot more difficult for people to manage.

The strategists, the designers, the writers, they're going to require tools to help keep up with the pace and keep the standards that they are known for.

Instead of hiding in a document nobody reads, it's baked into the tools people actually use every day.

Your guidelines shouldn't just describe your brand. They should run it.

Do I know exactly what this looks like yet? Nope. Nobody does. But that's the fun part.

So I've started building some of these tools. Wanna see what they look like?

CTA

• Where does your brand drift first, the logo, the type, or the tone of voice? Tell me below.
• Tell me the brand rule your team breaks every single week.

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Your brand isn't a document