A brand system you can hand to a team of one
Logos are easy. Keeping a brand consistent when nobody owns it is the hard part.
Most early teams do not have a brand designer. They have a founder, a marketer and whoever is free that afternoon. A brand system has to survive all three.
Start with what people actually make
Before we touch the logo, we list what the team ships every month: social posts, a pitch deck, the website, the odd event banner. The system is designed for those, not for a moodboard.
A logo is three files, not one
The mark on its own, the mark with the name, and a version that works at 16 pixels. Each in dark and light. That covers almost every place a logo ends up.
Colour with rules, not a palette
Five colours with no rules turn into five colours used at random. We give each one a job: one for actions, one for backgrounds, one for warnings, and two for everything else.
One page of guidelines
If the guidelines are longer than a page, nobody reads them. We keep one page with the logo, the colours and their jobs, the type sizes, and three examples of it done right.
