Brand consistency checklist: what each item is really testing

How to run it

Print or open everything the organisation actually produced in the last six months and lay it out together. Not the showcase pieces: everything, including the invoice, the automated email, the internal deck and the form nobody owns.

Then work down the list below against the whole pile. The order is by how often a reader encounters the artefact, not by how important it feels internally, because frequency is what builds recognition and frequency is inversely correlated with status.

The mark

• Is it the same drawing everywhere, or are there resized rasters in circulation?
• Is the reduced variant used where it should be (favicon, app icon, small badges) rather than the full mark shrunk?
• Is clear space respected, or has it been crowded in the places where space was tight?
• Does a one-colour version appear anywhere it was improvised rather than supplied?
• Has anything been stretched, recoloured, outlined, shadowed or placed on an unapproved background?

Type

• Are the brand faces present, or has a fallback taken over in documents and spreadsheets?
• Is the scale recognisable across pieces, or has each artefact invented its own sizes?
• Are there more heading levels in use than the system defines?
• Is anything set in a face nobody can account for, usually inherited from a template?
• Are the licences in place for every context the faces are used in, including anything embedded? See font licensing for what desktop terms do not cover.

Colour

• Are there variants of the core colours that are close but not identical?
• Is the core palette still small, or has it grown by absorption?
• Is contrast adequate on the combinations actually used, not just on the approved pair?
• Do the colours hold in the media they end up in: screen, uncoated stock, embroidery?

The artefacts that drift first

These are the ones to check before anything else. All of them are seen more often than the campaign work and almost none of them appear in guidelines.

• Email signature. Usually the oldest surviving version of the mark in the whole organisation.
• Invoice and quote templates. Made in an application with its own defaults, by somebody outside the design function.
• Automated and transactional email. Written once by whoever built the system.
• Form labels and error messages. The most-read writing an organisation produces and the least likely to have been reviewed.
• Slide templates. They acquire one unauthorised variant per quarter.
• Favicon and social avatars. The mark at its smallest, and frequently the wrong variant.
• Out-of-office replies. Genuinely the only writing some recipients ever get.

Voice

• Does the register move appropriately between an error message and an announcement, or is one tone applied everywhere?
• Is the vocabulary stable: the same word for the same thing across pieces?
• Does anything read as though it were written to a different audience than the piece next to it?

What to do with the findings

Sort them into two piles: things that need a decision, and things that need a template. The second pile is almost always larger, and it is the one that actually prevents recurrence: a rule tells somebody what to do, a template does it for them.

Fix the templates first, in order of how often the artefact appears. Then record the decisions in the one-page document, and resist the pull to expand it, for the reason given in the consistency entry: a document long enough to cover everything is a document nobody opens.