Brand style guides are written by brand teams and ignored by everyone else. The most common reason is that the guide has never been audited from the perspective of the people expected to use it.
Six audit dimensions
Completeness: does it cover every channel and asset format the team produces? Currency: is anything in it more than eighteen months old without review? Findability: can a typical user locate the right page in under ninety seconds? Specificity: are decisions specific enough to use without judgement? Tone: is the writing instructional rather than aspirational? Examples: are there worked examples for each rule, including counter-examples?
The user test
Recruit five users who have never seen the guide and give them three real production tasks. Observe where they get stuck. Failures cluster in two places: search, and language that requires brand-team translation. Both are fixable in a single sprint.
Maintenance ownership
A style guide without a named maintainer rots in twelve months. The maintainer needs ten percent of a role permanently allocated. If that allocation is not available, the guide is not actually a priority and should be deprecated rather than kept on life support.
Last updated May 2026 · Filed under Checklists