The Future Of Brand Guidelines promises big changes. Together with Brandpad, we decode what’s to come

Welcome back to The Future Of, a series presented in collaboration with digital brand guidelines platform Brandpad. Over the course of six articles, we’re speaking to the brightest designers, studios and agencies about the future of graphic design, unspooling the ideas that will shape tomorrow. In our fourth segment, we’re decoding the future of brand guidelines. An indispensable part of building brands and bringing them to life, brand guidelines have gone through tectonic shifts in the past few years. While we review where we are now, we also cast our eyes to the future. How will brand guidelines change? What parts of the old systems will we keep and what tweaks and overhauls will designers and technology bring in? And how will this impact the relationship between studios and clients? We went looking for the answers. For as long as branding has existed, there has been a need for designers to hand over their carefully crafted identities and brand worlds to their clients. For decades, brand guidelines have functioned as a single source of truth, helping companies bring their brands into the world just as they were meant to, enabling them to stay on script and avoid any design faux pas. In recent years though, brand guidelines have undergone a massive transformation. Long gone are the days of static PDFs; now, brand guidelines are not documents, but agile, digital tools that invite collaboration and experimentation. However, it’s safe to say that as the larger landscape of branding changes – as it does every day – the way brand guidelines are built and used will also reflect that evolution. “Guidelines should function as living, dynamic documents that can be updated as needed. They should feature the newest brand assets and relevant touchpoints, reflecting not only the brand’s foundational elements but also its most current iteration,” says Jules Tardy, Creative Director & Partner of San Francisco-based design and marketing agency The New Company. This is something brand guidelines might already be doing, but what changes can we expect, say five years down the line?