We onboarded a new partner shop last week. Kickoff call, introductions, everyone saying their own title slowly. At the end I did the thing I have done a hundred times. I sent over the brand guidelines. Eighty-three pages. Clearance zones, a two page meditation on our relationship to the color ochre, a grid system with its own glossary.
Their creative director said it looked comprehensive. That is the word people use when they mean heavy.
Nobody has opened it since. I know because the file share tells me so, and because three weeks later a layout came back with the logo shoved flush against the trim edge like it owed the page money.
This is not a failure of that shop. This is what happens to every brand book I have ever shipped, including the ones I was proud of.
A guidelines document does not govern anything. It records decisions that were already made, and then it becomes furniture.
Here is the part that gets lost. Guidelines get written by the people who ran the process, for the people who ran the process. They are a monument to the work, not an instrument for doing it. The ochre section exists because ochre took four weeks and somebody needed those four weeks to look inevitable. Meanwhile the person who actually needs help is a junior designer at ten at night trying to work out how big the logo goes on a tote bag.
Three things I do instead now.
One, write for the ten at night designer. Every rule should answer a question somebody has actually asked out loud. If nobody has ever asked it, cut it. My last book went from eighty pages to nineteen and got better in every way that matters.
Two, put it where the work happens. A PDF in a shared drive is a locked museum. Mailchimp published its voice and tone guidance as a plain website years ago and it is still the most used brand document in this industry, because you can search it and drop a link to one paragraph into a Slack thread. Shopify did the same with Polaris. A link beats an attachment. Always.
Three, accept that enforcement is a person, not a file. Somebody has to look at the tote bag and say no. That is a standing job with a name on it. Patagonia does not hold its line because of a PDF.
Every rule should answer a question somebody has actually asked out loud.
I printed one copy of the eighty-three page book, mostly out of spite. It lives on the shelf by the window. Barnaby sleeps on it every afternoon and Truffles has started using the spine as a chin rest. It is, at long last, doing useful work.