Brand systems

A brand built for print carries almost nothing an interface needs. It arrives with two colours and no greys, a display face that is unreadable at thirteen pixels, no state palette for error, warning, success or disabled, and no guidance for the sixteen sizes of type a dense screen requires. None of that is a failing of the identity; it is simply a different medium. But it means the brand work is not finished when the logo is approved — it is finished when it survives a settings page.

The parts that do the most work are the ones nobody presents. How tightly things are spaced, what the hierarchy of type sizes is, whether corners are sharp or soft and how consistently, what a hairline looks like — these decide whether a product feels like one thing, and they are felt long before anyone notices the logo. A distinctive mark on top of generic spacing and default type reads as generic, because most of what people see is the space between the elements.

A rebrand is mostly a migration, and underestimating that is how they stall halfway. The new identity has to reach a product, a marketing site, an email system, invoices, app stores, social profiles and whatever internal tool nobody remembered. Sequencing that so the company is never visibly half-changed is the actual project management, and it is worth planning before the first concept is presented rather than after it is signed off.