We've all done it. Spent weeks building the perfect brand guidelines. Every color specified. Every font pairing considered. Every do and don't documented. Forty-seven pages of rules that will ensure brand consistency forever.
Then someone in sales needs a quick flyer. Marketing is busy. Deadline is tomorrow. "Just this once," they say. And just like that, the logo appears in the wrong color, the wrong font, the wrong everything.
The problem isn't lack of rules. The problem is believing rules are what create consistency.
Consistency isn't about adherence to a manual. It's about shared understanding. It's about everyone knowing what the brand is trying to be, not just how it's supposed to look.
Nike's brand guidelines could fill a book. But the reason Nike stays consistent isn't because everyone reads the book. It's because everyone at Nike understands what "Just Do It" means as an ethos, not just a tagline. The guidelines document the culture; they don't create it.
Amul has maintained the same cartoon mascot since 1966. The Amul Girl. Same polka-dot dress. Same pigtails. But the billboard changes every week, commenting on current events. "Utterly Butterly Delicious" with a different pun each time. It's been running for nearly sixty years because the principle is consistent: timely, witty, never mean-spirited. The execution changes constantly, but the principle holds.
I've watched brands spend fortunes on guidelines that nobody follows. Comprehensive documents filled with rules that are too rigid for real life. "Never place the logo on a busy background." Lovely rule. Except the product photo is busy. And the photo is the whole point. So now what?
The brands that stay consistent aren't the ones with the most rules. They're the ones with the clearest principles. Principles are flexible. Rules are brittle.
Apple's principle: simplicity. How that manifests changes constantly — from rainbow logo to monochrome, from skeuomorphic design to flat, from "Think Different" to silence. But the principle remains.
Google's principle: utility first. Everything else follows from that. They can break every design rule in their own guidelines as long as the principle holds.
So here's the uncomfortable question: what if instead of more rules, we needed fewer? What if instead of documenting every possible scenario, we articulated the three things that actually matter? What if we trusted people to figure out the rest?
Because the truth is, the brands we admire most are often the ones that break their own rules beautifully. And the brands we forget are the ones that followed every rule perfectly.
Rules should guide, not govern. And the moment they become more important than the judgment of the people using them, we've built a cage, not a brand.