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The brand record is the canonical, accountable account of what a brand is, what it contains, and how it is allowed to be used at any given point in time. It is what a brand atlas holds. It is the artefact a brand owner is responsible for and the team works from.

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What the brand record contains

The brand record is the union of three things:
  1. The system. The decisions: which marks are canonical, which typefaces are licensed, which colours are approved, which photography direction is in force.
  2. The assets. The files those decisions point at: logo SVGs, type files, colour values, image libraries, templates.
  3. The history. The chronology of how each decision came to be: who proposed it, who approved it, when it changed, and what changed.
A PDF brand book is the first of these three with the second sometimes embedded and the third entirely absent. The brand record is all three, kept current, in one place, accountable.

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Why the brand record matters

A brand without a record is a brand whose identity exists only in the memory of the people who built it. When those people leave, the brand goes with them. The next team to inherit the brand is left to reconstruct the rules from whatever artefacts they can find, usually inconsistent, and usually contradictory. A brand record solves that. The brand owner who steps away from the company for a year returns to a record that has been kept current by the team. The agency that joins the brand after the original studio has rotated out finds the record waiting. The founder who sells the company hands over a brand record alongside the cap table.

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Who is responsible for the brand record

The brand owner is the single accountable person for the brand record. Brand authorship is the practice of holding that accountability: deciding what enters the record, what leaves it, and what changes. The brand owner can delegate edits (to a team member, to MadeBy_, to Oswald on the Guardian tier), but accountability for the record does not transfer. This is why team members raise Update Requests rather than editing directly. The brand owner reviews, approves, and merges. The record stays accountable because there is one person whose name is on every change.

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Versioning the brand record

The brand record is versioned at the level of the change, not the level of the document. When a new colour is added, that change is the unit. The team can see what was added, by whom, when, and against which proposal. There is no v3-final-final because there is no document. There is the current state plus an accountable history. The brand owner can roll back a change. The brand owner can also publish a milestone version: a marked point in the record’s history that the team can refer to. Milestones are useful for printed deliverables that need to declare which version of the brand they were produced against.

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The record and the atlas

The brand record is the abstract idea. The atlas is the working surface it lives on. The two are related the way a manuscript is related to the book: the manuscript is the content, the book is what holds it. Brand Atlas the product holds the brand record for a single brand. A team running multiple brands holds a brand record per brand. Each lives in its own atlas. The brand owner sees them in one account but they do not share material. The colour system of one is not the colour system of the other.

Brand authorship

Accountability for the record.

Stewardship

The continuous work of keeping the record current.

Brand evolution and maintenance

How the record changes over time.