Brand standards are full of rules and usually for good reason.
Imagine a logo standard that says: The logo must always appear on a solid-color background.
It's easy to understand why that rule exists. Logos need to be readable. A simple rule removes ambiguity, makes decisions faster and prevents someone from dropping a logo onto a busy photograph where it disappears.
Problem solved, right? Sure, but we've created another one....We've limiting every designer who uses the logo without considering the impact of the needs of the message, visual story and connection they're trying to make through their craft.
What if the standard instead said: Ensure the logo remains clearly readable and has sufficient contrast and marginal space against its background.
The principle hasn't changed. Readability is still non-negotiable. But now an experienced designer can look at a photograph, determine whether there's sufficient contrast and make an informed decision. Full-page photography becomes possible. The logo doesn't automatically need a box around it. And the designer has significantly more creative freedom without compromising the thing the original rule was intended to protect.
That's the difference between knowing the rule and understanding the reason.
And I think there's a parallel distinction in branding that matters just as much: Consistency and cohesion aren't he same thing.
Consistency is easy to recognize. Same template. Same composition. Same visual devices. Same treatment repeated again and again.
There's value in that, particularly when a brand is young, decentralized or trying to establish recognition. Templates create guardrails. They help many people produce work that belongs to the same organization without requiring everyone to make complex brand decisions.
I've built them. I've used them. I've encouraged teams to use them. But as a brand matures, I think the goal should evolve from simply creating consistency to creating cohesion.
Consistency says: These things look the same. Cohesion says: These things clearly belong together.
They don't have to match. They can rhyme.
That distinction opens an enormous amount of creative possibility and ability to connect with our audiences.
A pediatric campaign and an executive communication don't need to look identical to belong to the same brand. Neither do a social post, a donor story, an annual report or a recruitment campaign. Their audiences are different. Their objectives are different. The emotional response we're trying to create may be different.
If every communication is forced through the same template in the name of consistency, eventually we're asking the audience to adapt to our system instead of asking our system to adapt to the audience.
A mature brand system gives creative teams enough clarity about what is foundational (identity, voice, principles, recognizable visual characteristics) that they can respond to the audience and communication need without losing the brand.
A template tells us how we've done something before. A principle helps us understand why it worked and once we understand the why, we can ask the question that should have been driving the work all along:
What does this audience need from us here?
Sometimes the answer absolutely is a template. It's efficient, scalable and appropriate. Other times the design needs to become quieter, more emotional, more energetic or more human. The messaging may need to shift with it. Photography might carry more of the story. Typography might behave differently. The individual expressions can vary while the underlying brand remains recognizable.
That's cohesion.
I think of it a little like fishing: Knowing one reliable lure is useful. Understanding the fish, the water and the conditions is expertise.
You don't abandon everything you know because the conditions are different. You understand why your approach works well enough to recognize what should remain constant and what needs to change.
A mature brand works the same way. It shouldn't force us to choose between consistency and creativity. It should establish what's foundational clearly enough that creative teams can create meaningful variation without losing connection. Instead of saying, "Everything should look like this," we can say, "Everything should feel like us."
That requires more judgment from designers and more trust from leaders.
Prescriptive rules reduce ambiguity. Sometimes that's exactly what an organization needs. But they also reduce the range of possible solutions and connections. Principle-based standards ask more of the people using them, but they also allow us to respond more thoughtfully to audience, context and purpose.
The goal isn't fewer standards. It's better standards. Ones that protect what makes the brand recognizable without requiring every expression of it to be the same, because the strongest brands don't need every piece to match. They need them to belong.
About Leadership Notes
Leadership Notes is a collection of short reflections on creativity, leadership and how we think when the conditions around us change. Drawn from my experiences leading creative teams, raising a curious human and occasionally questioning my own assumptions, these aren't intended as instructions for how to lead. They're observations about the things I'm still thinking about, learning from and figuring out along the way.