Specialized audit
Brand Guidelines Audit
An assessment of the brand guidelines you have, the gaps they leave open, and what it takes for the brand to hold together everywhere it shows up.
What is the Brand Guidelines Audit?
The Brand Guidelines Audit starts from whatever you have — a polished PDF, a folder of logo files, or nothing written down at all. It assesses what exists, names what is missing, and returns recommendations for closing the gap.
The assessment covers how the brand actually shows up: logo usage, typography, and color application across web, social, email, and ads; voice and tone; and how the presentation compares against your competitive set. Consistency is measured, not eyeballed.
Scope
What it examines
- Visual consistency
- Logo usage, typography, and color application across web, social, email, and ads.
- Voice and tone
- Whether the brand sounds like one organization everywhere it speaks.
- Guidelines coverage
- What the current guidelines govern — and the decisions they leave unmade.
- Competitive positioning
- How the brand’s presentation compares against its real competitive set.
Deliverables
What you receive
- Brand Consistency Scorecard
- Consistency graded surface by surface — web, social, email, ads.
- Guidelines Gap Report
- What the guidelines are missing, and which gaps cause the drift you can see.
- Usage Examples
- Correct and incorrect usage documented from your own channels.
Pricing
Fixed price: $1,800
Typical timeline: 10 business days
Defined deliverables, defined timeline. Scope is confirmed at intake and the price is fixed before work starts.
A sneak peek
What a complete brand system looks like
The standard this audit measures against is a brand system, not a document: one place where everything the brand owns lives — the style guide, the usage rules, an approved component library rendered live, and the collateral templates your team actually pulls from. When the system is the single source, the brand cannot drift one ad-hoc export at a time.
This is what that looks like in practice — the brand kit I built for Throughline, a Calgary brand consultancy. Sections are proposed, reviewed, and approved in the kit, then graduate to the live site — so design decisions get made on real, rendered components instead of mockups.
Does your brand hold together everywhere?
Send what you have — guidelines, files, or nothing at all. The audit starts from what exists and names what is missing.