A piece of advice I’ve consistently given the designers I’ve worked with over the years is this: never take the work personally, and never stop caring about it. That can sound contradictory at first, but it’s really the same instinct arriving from two directions. Design is an inherently subjective discipline. Critique is baked into how designers are trained, and once you’re in practice the work gets evaluated internally, externally, and often against factors that have nothing to do with what you actually made. None of it is personal; the work exists to solve a problem for a client, not to feed our own egos. But the moment you stop caring about the work, it shows up in the output, and the audience is bound to notice. Just like with cooking: two people can follow the same recipe, yet only one plate ends up tasting like it was made with love. You can’t name what’s missing, but you know something’s missing.
Care leaves fingerprints.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. As whole industries are prioritizing efficiency and automation to streamline processes, care is becoming more and more scarce—and brand scaling is where the trade-off shows up first.
I’ve spent two decades at VSA—my entire career. From cutting my teeth on IBM annual reports through brand systems built for Google Cloud, CME Group, BNY and others. One of the few things that has stayed constant across every discipline I’ve touched here, and frankly, the reason I stay, is the level of care the work here demands, and colleagues who care about it as much as I do. What I’ve come to believe is that whether a brand endures in fast-changing times comes down, more than anything else, to how much the humans behind it care. When so much of what we consume is now prompt-generated, care is what separates a brand that scales from one that simply grows.
Brand scaling is the work of keeping a brand recognizably itself across all platforms, channels and markets. It often gets conflated with brand growth, but they serve different purposes. Growth is a business measure; think revenue, headcount, product line, footprint. Scaling is what the brand has to do regardless of the growth trajectory the business is on. In fact, when a business is under pressure and the resources thin out, the brand often has to scale harder, not less.
Historically, scaling focused on the core visual and verbal elements of a brand’s identity. Guidelines were largely executional rulebooks—typography specs, color values, tone of voice, and, if you were on the receiving end, the inescapable client request to "make the logo bigger." Consistency meant providing the same experience across the handful of channels available to reach your audience.
Then the surface area exploded. Brands that once primarily lived in print media and a corporate website, were now showing up live on smartphones, online-marketplaces, AI chats, search, and social media. Companies that either applied the same assets into every channel, or scattered disconnected ones across each, were outperformed by competitors who built content that told one coherent story wherever it landed.
Effective brand scaling means adapting quickly when a new touchpoint appears, and it increasingly means being ready to show up in real time when a question or issue is raised. But speed on its own won’t hold a brand together across that much surface area. What drives consistency is making sure everyone who touches the brand—not just designers—understands why the brand looks, sounds, and behaves the way it does. A rule without a stated reason gets ignored the moment someone hits an edge or corner case.
Modern guidelines can’t be rigid rules written in stone. They have to be a living, breathing operating system, able to grow, change, and respond to an ever-changing environment while helping a brand stay true to and recognizably itself.
More and more, that living system also has to include a point of view on AI. Depending on the space you’re in, AI has different relevancy and context, but whether it’s a product line, an internal tool, or a creative accelerator, brands need to define what AI means to them expressively and behaviorally, and not only in the terms their legal team would use. Brands whose guidelines don’t adapt for AI and emerging technologies are being outpaced by those that do.
In a company-wide memo to IBM in 1966, CEO Thomas J. Watson, Jr. notably declared that good design is good business. The memo put words to something that has always been true across every industry, and remains true today: strong brands and strong design consistently track with how a business performs. What’s changed over time is what "good" requires. Consistent aesthetics alone does not make good design. As new tech empowers brands to flood the market with unprecedented speed, standing out asks more of the brand than looking the part.
Several decades after Watson’s memo, the company’s Chief Brand Officer Jon Iwata helped shape a framework that captures what makes a brand effective in this environment: a brand has to look, sound, think, and perform like itself—unmistakably, and across every touchpoint. That framing has held up remarkably well, and it becomes especially useful when you’re designing for channels the original guidelines never anticipated.
And that’s the point where the humans behind the brand start to matter more than the rulebook itself.
When the VSA team built Cloudstyle, Google Cloud’s global design system, the goal was a visual framework that let channel-specific voice and tone shift within a system that held the brand’s look and feel steady. It had to scale globally across websites, print, out-of-home, and everything down to the smallest banner ad, and still tell a story that could only belong to Google. We defined the brand system and extended that design ethos and verbal identity into every corner of the marketing organization and every region. When brand systems are designed with the brand in mind from the beginning, they can adapt to new channels as those channels emerge, rather than needing to be retrofitted after the fact.
Or take Duolingo. The brand and the product are both grounded on the same premise: gamification applied to language learning. That delight extends across every aspect of how they show up. Their mascot, Duo, appears in timely pop culture moments and scenarios you’d never expect. But every appearance reflects Duolingo’s playfulness. The brand isn’t chasing relevance in ways that dilute it, and even at its most ridiculous, Duo stays Duo. If that owl lost its whimsy, audiences would notice, and the brand would stop feeling true. Over time, this would cost the company customers.
Care may look like attention to detail, but it really is attention to customer needs.
Consistency doesn’t require a brand to be identical everywhere. It requires a brand to always show up in a way that is inexplicably true to who they are. A person may behave differently at work than they do at home, but that doesn’t mean they’re different people. Similarly, a brand can show up differently across channels while still being itself.
For teams thinking about how to actually scale a brand with care in this environment, a few practical starting points:
1. Write your guidelines for every audience that touches the brand. That includes designers, marketers, product teams, writers, and even sales. All of them need to understand why the rules exist, because a rule without clear understanding just becomes empty words on a paper (or a screen).
2. Define the brand across all four dimensions, not just two. “Looks like” and “sounds like” the two most brands already cover well. “Thinks like” and “behaves like” are the harder ones, and they often make the difference in which scaled brands hold together and which fall apart. What does your brand do when a customer asks a hard question in real time? How does it show up visually when something breaks? What decisions does it refuse to make on autopilot, no matter how much faster autopilot would be?
3. Build principles that allow the brand to adapt beyond the rulebook of the day. You will never anticipate every channel or scenario in advance. What you can do is give your team enough shared understanding of the brand’s core beliefs that a smart person—who cares—can make a good call in a moment nobody predicted.
4. Put a point of view on AI directly into your guidelines. Most brand books today are silent on this, which leaves the choice up to whichever tool happens to be open in someone’s browser. Say what you believe about AI’s role in your brand: what it accelerates, what stays human, what tone it should carry when it speaks on your behalf. And, as more teams train models on their own brand assets, be explicit about what feeds those models and what stays off limits. That extends beyond voice and tone into photo treatments, illustration, motion and iconography.
5. Protect care while fostering curiosity. Fast content is easy to produce. Content that stands out because someone thought carefully about the human on the other side of it takes longer, and that is the entire reason for doing the work. But care on its own can slip into complacency. Curiosity is what keeps it pointed in the right direction: toward why the brand exists, what the customer actually needs, and how the system should keep evolving. Guidelines built by teams only executing on rules will always feel, well, just executed. The brands that actually scale come from people who stayed curious. It’s an under-appreciated soft skill, and one we look for in every designer we hire.
We are living in an age when brands can flood the market across every channel with machine speed. Brand scaling comes down to whether the humans behind the system still care enough to make it feel specifically theirs across every touchpoint a customer actually meets, from packaging to a product interface to a support screen to an ad. If you don’t care, why should anyone care enough to keep choosing you?
Two people can follow the same recipe, but only one plate tastes like it was made with love. Our services help brands build visual identity systems that hold together across every channel, put a real point of view on AI into the guidelines, and keep care visible in the places customers notice. If your brand is showing up everywhere and feeling like itself nowhere, let’s talk.
