The Creative Director’s Checklist: The ultimate guide to effective brand building from Frontify

The result is that many CDs around the world (the survey featured respondents from the UK & Ireland, the US, Australia, Brazil, China, Japan and South Africa) experience stunted growth and job dissatisfaction. In fact, 70 percent of the CDs surveyed agreed that “lack of time is the main problem that prevents memorable creative output”, while 67 percent said their organisation or client “didn’t have a shared strategy for the brand”, and 57 percent said they “struggle with people and departments not cooperating well”.

According to Frontify, the initial step for any CD or creative leader should be to audit your brand, and take stock of what works and what doesn’t. Given that the primary obstacle faced by respondents was organisational, this step, as with all of the steps in the guide, is less about strategy, ideation and execution, and more about what needs to be in place for these processes to run smoothly. Some things to consider here are the quality, quantity and location of your assets, how many of these are reused vs recreated (with the latter requiring more time) and how easy it is for all relevant teams to access these assets.

Crucially, these audits should take place on a fairly frequent basis to have the desired effect. Not only does this ensure that assets are easy to use and easy to find, but it also ensures that they are in keeping with the brand’s wider visual language and systems. Speaking on this, Rapha Abreu, global vice president of design at The Coca-Cola Company, says auditing is an important task there: “We conduct regular audits of our brands’ visual identities to ensure they remain distinct and relevant,” he explains. “This process involves reviewing all brand assets globally, from packaging to digital interfaces, after every large program, ensuring they are aligned with our core design principles of distinctiveness and consistency.”

This is something Rapha knows only too well, saying that the Coca-Cola team “uses digital templates extensively to ensure consistency and efficiency while scaling design content across touchpoints globally”. He continues: “Recently, we have been exploring AI solutions to enhance this by allowing regional teams to create locally nuanced, on-brand content better and faster. With features like AI-driven customisation and automated workflows, it helps streamline creative processes while maintaining high design quality standards​.”

Amy adds to this, saying “as brand designers, systems are critical for us because they are how we maintain brand consistency, and templates are the best and most efficient way to scale that across our organisation and any designer working with our brand system. Our design teams, like a lot of the industry, create a lot of templates in Figma, and as we create we’re really oriented towards thinking about what we can templatise. Templatised components have also been a big part of the digital ecosystem work. The trick there is to create enough guidance without limiting creativity or restricting brand personality.”

Indeed, guidance is the name of the game here – hard and fast rules can actually end up destroying the very thing they were created to serve. Crucially, true creativity calls for occasional challenging of the status quo, and far from destabilising a brand’s system, this process actually keeps it healthy and up-to-date with cultural and industry developments. In the same spirit, the final step of the guide is all about “measuring progress continually”. Frontify writes that “analytics is the key to keeping the whole brand on track,” and this has been proven time and time again.

Studying your DAM and portal analytics can help to inform a brand strategy that is sustainable and adaptable. Keeping on top of this will ensure that teams are consistently using assets wisely, simplifying day-to-day tasks, and generally saving time that can be allocated to more important things, like “dreaming big”. For Frontify, the latter is by the far the biggest benefit of a strong brand-building system, with the team writing that it gives you “the most important resource any creative can have: time”. They continue: “A centralised solution with a robust DAM, collaborative tools, and automated tasks optimises daily operations and adaptability to major changes. Consistent brand usage promotes efficiency and effectiveness in the long run. This setup builds the foundation for bigger, faster, and more daring creative projects.”