Guidelines nobody reads

Identity

28 May 2026

8 min read

A 240-page PDF is a monument, not a tool. What we write instead, what we stopped writing entirely, and how we test whether any of it works.

We built one of those documents in 2019. It was thorough, it was well set, and it was downloaded four times in the first year by a company of nine hundred people. Two of those downloads were us.

The failure was not the writing. It was the assumption that anyone would go looking.

The people who need brand guidance are rarely designers. They are a regional manager making a poster on Friday afternoon, a recruiter formatting a job ad, an engineer putting a logo on a dashboard at eleven at night. None of them will read forty pages to find a hex value, and all of them will guess if guessing is faster.

So we now write for that person first, and the constraint list looks like this:

The last one is the hardest to agree to and the only one that reliably changes behaviour.

If the right thing is not the easiest thing to do at five on a Friday, it will not be done.

From the internal review, 2024

Three things. A one-page sheet that fits on a wall and covers ninety per cent of daily questions. A set of templates in the tools people already have open, with the decisions already made inside them. And a short written section on the two or three judgements that genuinely need explaining, which we keep under a thousand words.

The long document still exists, but its audience changed. It is now for the agency who wins the next pitch and the print supplier who needs specifications, and we say so on the cover. Nobody is being asked to read it for pleasure.

The templates do most of the work. When a deck is correct because it opens correct, nobody has to be taught anything, and the guidelines stop being a compliance exercise.

Pl. 02  Wall sheet and template set, second revision

We now test guidelines the way you would test an interface. Give someone who has never seen the brand a real task — make this social post, format this ad — and watch without helping. The first run is usually humbling. Six of the first eight testers on one project could not find the secondary colour, which was on page nineteen.

We repeat the test six months after handover, with people who joined since. That second round is more useful than the first, because by then the document has met reality and the templates have been quietly copied, renamed and broken.

Write the one-page sheet first, before the long document rather than after it. When the summary comes last it inherits the structure of the thing it summarises, and that structure was built for a reader who does not exist.