Brand audit
Brand audit
checklist.
Twenty questions to ask of your current brand system. Identity, voice, applications, performance. Run it yourself in ~45 minutes — you'll have a short list of what's working and a longer list of what's leaking before you commission a rebrand you may not need.
Identity & visual system
- 01 Is your wordmark legible at a 32x32 favicon? If not, the mark is doing surface work but failing at the smallest surface it has to live on.
- 02 Does your logo lockup work without colour (pure black on white, pure white on black)? Brands that only work in their brand palette fail every co-marketing piece.
- 03 Do you have a defined type pairing — display + body — with fallback chains? "Use this font" without a fallback means every system that fails to load it improvises.
- 04 Is your colour system tokenised — primary, accent, neutrals, semantic states — and used as variables in product code, not hex codes? Hex-coded brands cannot be rebranded without a multi-week engineering project.
- 05 Are your shadow + radius values capped at ≤6 distinct values? Systems with 14 different shadows look improvised.
- 06 Do you have a primary and a secondary mark? Single-mark brands have nowhere to go in tight contexts (favicon, app collapse, sticker, watermark).
Voice & messaging
- 07 Can a new hire write a product update in your brand voice without a designer in the loop? If not, the brand voice exists only in one person's head.
- 08 Do your error states sound like your hero copy, or do they sound like the engineering team wrote them? Voice that disappears in error states isn't voice.
- 09 Is your positioning statement one sentence long, and does it survive being read by a hostile reviewer? "We build AI-powered solutions for forward-thinking teams" doesn't survive.
- 10 Do you have a documented messaging hierarchy — what we say first, second, third when the audience hasn't heard of us — or does every channel improvise?
Application surfaces
- 11 Marketing site, in-product UI, sales deck, social — does the brand read as the same system on all four, or are there visible drift points?
- 12 Are your social templates restricted to ≤4 layouts so a non-designer can run them, or does every post invent its own layout?
- 13 Sales decks: are they built from a template the team can use, or does every deck get designed from scratch (and look slightly different)?
- 14 Email signatures across the team — same lockup, same type, same colours? If not, every external email is a small brand drift.
- 15 OG / Twitter card images — do you have a per-page template the team can populate, or does every link share with a default favicon-on-white?
Performance & rollout
- 16 When did you last audit which fonts, images, and brand assets your site actually loads? Brands ship 8 weight variants of a typeface they only use 2 of.
- 17 Has the brand survived 12 months without a designer-in-loop being needed for every change? If not, the brand is too high-touch for the team running it.
- 18 Do you have a brandbook (PDF + Figma) that a new agency or contractor could pick up and use without a 2-hour walkthrough?
- 19 If you rebranded tomorrow, do you have an inventory of every surface the current brand lives on (marketing, product, sales, social, paid creative, support, partners)?
- 20 Is there a 30-minute handoff video on file that explains the system to the next person who joins or replaces the design lead?
Want us to run this for you?
15-minute Loom audit on your existing brand. Free. No email gate, no follow-up sequence. Send the URL.