Systems
Oct 14, 2026
6 min
Write the rules your team will actually follow
A guideline only works if the person shipping on Friday afternoon can use it without asking anyone.
Most brand guidelines are written for the person who approved them. They should be written for the person shipping a landing page at four on a Friday.
Rules beat examples
An example shows one good answer. A rule tells you how to get the next one. If a page in your guidelines can’t be turned into a sentence that starts with ‘always’ or ‘never’, it probably isn’t doing any work.
Publish the exceptions
Every system has them. When you write them down, people stop inventing their own. Ours usually fit on a single page, and that page gets read more than any other.
Test it on someone new
Give the rules to someone who joined last week, then ask them to build a poster. Wherever they stop and ask a question, the system has a hole in it.