Bryan Needs a Title for His Home Page
Compliance problem vs systems problem
A hundred people making the same mistake isn’t a compliance problem. It’s a systems problem.
At one global enterprise I worked with, the branding was having a crisis. Every department, operating group, and regional team had their own version of the company logo. Some had their department name under it. Some had their operating group. Some had their team. The typography was inconsistent across all of them, and no single PR agency globally was in alignment with another.
And the colors were everywhere. The same logo ranged from fire engine red to pink depending on who made it and when.
The instinct was to treat this as a compliance problem. People aren’t following the brand guidelines. Send another memo. But when I dug into it, the root cause was technical, not behavioral. There was no approved RGB color specification and no digital master artwork. The brand guidelines had been built for print. When people needed the logo for a website or a presentation, they recreated it themselves and eyeballed the color. They weren’t being sloppy. They were working without a standard that fit the medium they were working in.
As part of a global SEO and brand realignment I was leading, I brought in a designer experienced in corporate brand guidelines at this scale and commissioned a streamlined set of standards built around the company’s identity priorities. We reduced the logo sprawl down to one master logo, two operating group variants, and a handful of controlled carve-outs for specific use cases like environmental branding, and a couple of regionally required variants that I recall.
Then my team built out a digital version of the brand guidelines with downloadable master artwork for every medium: web, letterhead, presentations. For web logos specifically, we created pre-sized assets at every standard dimension with a clear rule: if you need a size we haven’t provided, you contact Corporate Communications. You don’t make it yourself.
After rollout, I’d routinely spot-check logos across the company with an image editor’s color picker. Trust the process, but verify the pixels.
The lesson is the same one that shows up everywhere in operations: when a lot of people are doing the same thing wrong, the problem usually isn’t the people. It’s the system they’re working in. Make the right thing the easy thing, and you’ll spend a lot less time chasing the wrong thing.
At one global enterprise I worked with, the branding was having a crisis. Every department, operating group, and regional team had their own version of the company logo. Some had their department name under it. Some had their operating group. Some had their team. The typography was inconsistent across all of them, and no single PR agency globally was in alignment with another.
And the colors were everywhere. The same logo ranged from fire engine red to pink depending on who made it and when.
The instinct was to treat this as a compliance problem. People aren’t following the brand guidelines. Send another memo. But when I dug into it, the root cause was technical, not behavioral. There was no approved RGB color specification and no digital master artwork. The brand guidelines had been built for print. When people needed the logo for a website or a presentation, they recreated it themselves and eyeballed the color. They weren’t being sloppy. They were working without a standard that fit the medium they were working in.
As part of a global SEO and brand realignment I was leading, I brought in a designer experienced in corporate brand guidelines at this scale and commissioned a streamlined set of standards built around the company’s identity priorities. We reduced the logo sprawl down to one master logo, two operating group variants, and a handful of controlled carve-outs for specific use cases like environmental branding, and a couple of regionally required variants that I recall.
Then my team built out a digital version of the brand guidelines with downloadable master artwork for every medium: web, letterhead, presentations. For web logos specifically, we created pre-sized assets at every standard dimension with a clear rule: if you need a size we haven’t provided, you contact Corporate Communications. You don’t make it yourself.
After rollout, I’d routinely spot-check logos across the company with an image editor’s color picker. Trust the process, but verify the pixels.
The lesson is the same one that shows up everywhere in operations: when a lot of people are doing the same thing wrong, the problem usually isn’t the people. It’s the system they’re working in. Make the right thing the easy thing, and you’ll spend a lot less time chasing the wrong thing.