Dossier’sCase studies

Northwind is nine people doing brand and campaign work for other companies, and none of them wanted to be the person who approves slide decks.

Their previous guidelines were a sixty-page PDF nobody had opened since it arrived:

• Everything on brand was on brand because one person had made it
• That person was the bottleneck for every proposal and every deck
• Nobody could find the current logo files
• Each city office had quietly invented its own variation

Nine people producing on-brand material without a designer in the loop. Rules that fit on two sides of a page. Nothing that needs approval.

We audited a year of the studio's output and found that five artifacts account for most of it: a deck, a proposal, a one-pager, an invoice and a social template.

Then we built those five as working files rather than describing them in a document. Guidelines describe the rules; templates enforce them, and only one of the two survives a deadline.

What the studio has now:

• Forty templates, each already correct and each editable
• One typeface, one mark, and a rule about the white space around content
• A single link that always resolves to the current files
• A two-page rulebook covering the cases templates cannot

Version drift stopped, which is the only success condition an identity system really has.

A system that specifies everything gets ignored, because complying costs more than ignoring. A system that specifies three things gets followed.