Presented by Brandpad: how to handover an identity system to your client in the digital world

Welcome to The Finishing Line, a series presented in collaboration with the digital brand guidelines platform Brandpad. Over the course of six articles, we’ll be talking to creative industry leaders about what is often seen as one of the most challenging, fiddly, frustrating and complicated elements of brand design: getting it over the line. For our maiden issue, we’re looking at the ‘big bad’ of finishing a project, the handover. “When I first entered the industry,” Luke Woodhouse, Creative Director at London-based branding agency Ragged Edge, tells us, “the ultimate goal for a brand designer was to print a beautiful coffee table book, call it brand guidelines, and try and tell everyone it was useful,” discussing how the approach to handing over brands to clients has quite radically changed. “If that document found its way to a designer that had enough respect for the work to actually read it and play by its rules,” he adds, “then maybe it would be useful, but that never really happened,” a sentiment and experience shared by NYC-based design studio PORTO ROCHA. “Much has changed since Felipe and I started working with design about 15 years ago,” Co-founder & Creative Director Leo Porto explains, recalling the prominence of traditional branding principles, notably consistency, order and control. “The modernist ideal was to raise brand awareness through the repetition of an iconic symbol,” Porto continues, “combined with strict guideline standards and grids,” notions which aren’t quite as prevalent as they once were. “Today, accelerated by the speed at which culture, technology and information move,” he details, “brands need to be more dynamic and multifaceted than ever,” no longer satisfied with “a 30-something-page PDF” or the everyday do’s and don’ts.