A launch is the best a brand will ever look. Everything is new, the photography is fresh and the people who made it are still in the room. The real test comes a year later, when an intern is making a social post at half past five on a Friday.

What breaks first

It’s rarely the logo. It’s usually the things that seemed too small to write down: how much space goes around a headline, which grey is the grey, what happens when a product name runs to three lines. Guidelines that only show the perfect case don’t help much on an ordinary day.

So we write ours for the ordinary day. Fewer rules, more examples of the awkward cases, and a page called ‘When in doubt’ that clients tell us they actually use.

Checking in

Twelve months after launch we ask to see everything the client has made without us. It’s not always comfortable. But it’s the most useful hour of any project, and it changes how we design the next one.