Governance
Four mechanisms guard a brand, and each answers a different failure.
The four
Section titled “The four”| Mechanism | Guards against |
|---|---|
| Brand controls | Someone using a font or colour that is not in the brand |
| Template locks | Someone moving or deleting part of a template that must not change |
| Version snapshots | A change that turns out to be wrong |
| Activity log | Not knowing who changed something, or when |
They do not overlap. A control cannot undo a change, a snapshot cannot prevent one, and the log does neither — it only tells you what happened.
Enforcement is a spectrum, deliberately
Section titled “Enforcement is a spectrum, deliberately”Brand controls offer Strict, which blocks usage completely, and Warning, which shows a warning but allows it.
That choice exists because absolute enforcement is not always right. A brand that is still settling, or a team doing genuinely experimental work, will route around a strict rule rather than comply with it — and routing around means leaving the platform, which loses you the log as well as the rule.
Warnings keep the work inside the system and tell you where the rule is under pressure. Strict is for the small number of things that genuinely cannot bend.
Controls are opt-in by construction
Section titled “Controls are opt-in by construction”The control dialog states it: leave the allowed list empty to allow everything, and selecting some makes the rest a violation.
So a control does nothing until somebody decides what is permitted. That is the right default — a control that restricted everything by existing would break every project the moment it was created — but it does mean an empty control is not a safe control. It is an inactive one.
Locks are per element, not per template
Section titled “Locks are per element, not per template”A template lock names one element inside one template and freezes specific aspects of it: position, size, content, style, or deletion, chosen independently.
That granularity is what makes locks usable. Locking a whole template would make it read-only and therefore useless; locking the logo’s position and size while leaving the body content editable is a template people can still work in.
What none of this covers
Section titled “What none of this covers”Nothing here validates a design against the guidelines. Controls check what was used against a list; they do not judge whether the result is good, or whether the clear-space rule was honoured.
That stays human, which is the argument for writing guidelines that are checkable by a person rather than aspirational.
Related
Section titled “Related”Brand controls covers setting them up. Versions and history covers snapshots and the log.