A brand identity is a set of working files, not a folder of pictures

01The test a handover has to pass

Someone in your team will need the logo for a situation nobody planned: embroidered on a shirt, etched on one color, placed over a photograph, shrunk to a browser tab, printed by a sign shop that asks for a format you have never heard of. The identity is finished when those requests can be answered from the folder without calling the designer.

That is the whole standard, and it is more demanding than it sounds. Most handovers we inherit contain a logo as a flat image at one size, a color written only as a screen value, and a font the client is not licensed to use.

02What should be in the folder

This is the list we deliver, and a reasonable list to ask of anyone else.

• Logo in vector source, plus exports in the formats a print supplier, a web developer and an office application each need.
• Variants: full version, compact version, mark only, one color, and a version that holds up small.
• Clear space and minimum size, stated as a rule rather than shown in an example.
• Color values for screens and for print, with the readable text combinations identified.
• Fonts with the license documents, plus a fallback for environments where they cannot be installed.
• Templates people actually use: a document, a slide deck, an email signature, a social profile set.
• A short rules document: what not to do, with the three mistakes that happen most.

If the handover has no license documents for the fonts, you do not have the right to use them. That is the single most common gap we find.

03Color is a legal and accessibility question too

A brand color chosen on a designer screen can be unreadable as a background for text, and in the US an inaccessible site is a real legal exposure rather than a theoretical one. The fix is cheap at the identity stage: pick the color, then define which text colors are permitted on it and which combinations are forbidden.

Print adds a second set of values, and they will not match the screen exactly. The honest approach is to define both and accept the small difference, rather than discovering it on the first batch of printed material.

04Why this matters more than how the logo looks

A brand becomes recognisable through repetition, and repetition requires that other people can apply it without asking permission. Every gap in the handover becomes an improvisation: a slide with the wrong blue, a van with a stretched logo, a form in a font nobody chose. After a year the identity exists in the original presentation and nowhere else.

This is also why we deliver identities as working files with rules rather than as a presentation. A beautiful presentation is a proposal. Files your team can use are the product.

05What we deliver and what it costs

Brand systems start at $6,500 and arrive as the folder described above, with the awkward cases solved and the fonts licensed in your name. The files are yours, and so are the accounts anything is registered under.

If you already have an identity and the problem is that nobody can use it, the work is smaller and we will scope it as such: usually the missing formats, the small size variant, the color rules and the templates.