A Designers Perspective: Freedom Within the Guideline
When it comes to brand guidelines, there’s a common misconception: that they exist to constrain. Lock down the logo. Police the typeface. Keep everyone in line. At SE Studio, we see it differently. Guidelines that are too prescriptive tend to fail — people either rebel against them or quietly ignore them. The brands that hold together over time are almost always the ones built on flexible, well-reasoned systems rather than rigid rulebooks.
We sat down with Co-Founders Lindsay Gravette and Margaretha Andreasson to talk about how they approach brand systems, what makes guidelines actually stick and where most go wrong.
By Lindsay Gravette, Margaretha Andreassen, James Thomas and Emma Nopola.
The Interview
Let’s start with philosophy. When you look at brand guidelines, do you see them as a creative constraint or a creative tool?
Lindsay: “I see guidelines as a framework to express a company’s communications consistently. Really, they are there to free you up - not to trap you. If every decision requires starting from scratch, you’re not designing, you’re just making things up.”
Margaretha: “Exactly. And guidelines that are too prescriptive fail for a different reason - they can’t keep up. Brands live across so many surfaces now. When we built the guidelines for Twin Health, the goal was to create a flexible kit of parts that could be assembled in different ways for different contexts, rather than prescribing every possible execution."
That raises the question of where guidelines actually live now? The PDF brand book feels like a different era.
Lindsay: “The medium has changed, which has changed the meaning. Today, we build most of our guidelines directly in Figma - because that’s where design decisions get made. The guidelines aren’t a document you consult; they’re embedded in the tools you’re already using.”
Marge: “There’s a practical reason component libraries have replaced brand books for a lot of teams: a PDF tells you what something should look like; a Figma library shows you how to actually build it. The decision-making is embedded in the tool, so designers aren’t interpreting - they’re assembling. That’s a fundamentally different relationship with a brand system.”
When you’re starting a new project, where do guidelines begin for you?
Marge: "They usually start right during and after the visual exploration phase. We might design something unexpected and immediately think - how does this scale? How does this behave across touchpoints? The guidelines start forming as we answer those questions.”
Marge: "Our work with ArcticDB is a good example. ArcticDB was a quantitative data platform spun out of Man Group - a business with serious technical credibility but no brand presence of its own. The guidelines didn’t come at the end; they emerged alongside the identity.
As we developed the visual language - the mountain-and-graph logomark, the custom typeface, the deep purple palette - we were simultaneously asking: how does this live on a billboard? On a developer’s GitHub? On a conference lanyard? The system had to be coherent at every scale before we could call it done."
Lindsay: "DM10 presented a different challenge. The Maradona legacy is powerful and emotionally loaded - there’s an enormous amount of visual energy to work with. The temptation is to use all of it, everywhere. The guidelines work here was about restraint: deciding where the boldness should breathe and where it should pull back. So the guidelines weren’t about replicating the aesthetic - they were about teaching the logic behind it."
We’ve all seen beautiful brand books get ignored. What makes guidelines actually work day-to-day?
Lindsay: “This might sound counterintuitive, but in some ways, guidelines should be forgotten day-to-day. An internalised brand system means the thinking has been absorbed - the ‘why’ behind every decision is understood well enough that you don’t need to check a document.”
Marge: “The brands we see fall apart in execution are almost always the ones where the guidelines were written after the design, not alongside it. By then, you’re documenting decisions rather than building a system - and documentation doesn’t transfer intent, it just transfers rules.”
What’s the hardest part of turning a strong, distinctive design into a repeatable system?
Marge: “The hardest part is preventing the soul of the design from getting crushed by overly strict rules. Every brand has a quality - an energy, a point of view - that lives in the original design work. The challenge is finding a way to encode that quality into a system without flattening it.”
Lindsay: “The ultimate goal is finding that balance of guidance and flexibility. And that threshold varies enormously by context, by team, by the maturity of the brand. There’s no universal answer, which is why the guidelines process has to be bespoke.”
Does that balance change in more regulated industries - healthcare, for example?
Marge: “Definitely. Brand systems in healthcare require a certain baseline of ‘everyone must use this, always.’ In healthcare, there’s a version of brand failure you don’t see in other sectors - where a design that’s too expressive actually erodes patient trust. We had to think carefully about which elements of the Twin Health system were fixed versus flexible. The clinical touchpoints needed consistency above all else. The marketing materials had more room to move. Building that hierarchy into the guidelines - not just the aesthetics - was the real design problem.”
Lindsay: “And if you don’t build flexibility into guidelines, internal teams just end up remaking assets from scratch anyway - which creates inconsistency far worse than a flexible system would have. Rigidity doesn’t produce control. It just produces workarounds.”
Key Principles
After years of building brand systems across sectors, a few things consistently hold true:
Guidelines should be forgotten, not consulted. When a team has truly internalized a brand, they stop needing to check the document. That’s the goal.
Write guidelines alongside the design, not after. Post-hoc documentation transfers rules; a system built in parallel transfers intent.
Flexibility isn’t a compromise — it’s the point. A system with no room to move will either be ignored or broken.
Hierarchy matters in regulated sectors. Knowing which elements are fixed versus flexible is as important as the design itself.
Component libraries beat PDFs. Embedding decisions in tools means fewer interpretations and fewer mistakes.
Systems That Inspire
At the end of the day, a brand system shouldn’t feel like a cage - it should feel like a launchpad. At SE Studio, we build guidelines that give teams the confidence to move quickly and the clarity to move consistently. Because a brand that can’t scale isn’t really a brand - it’s just a moment.
About the piece: James Thomas and Emma Nopola in conversation with Lindsay Gravette and Margaretha Andreasson, co-founders at SE Studio. SE Studio is a branding, design and technology studio with offices in London and San Francisco. Case studies referenced: ArcticDB — An Identity With Scale | DM10 — A Fan Club For All
