How to audit a brand you inherited (and the five places drift shows first)

Short answer: When you take over a brand, audit it around the five places drift shows first — colour, logo, type, templates, and voice. Gather everything in one place, check each against what's supposed to be true, and record the gaps. That audit becomes the plan for getting the brand back on course.

Inheriting a brand is a particular kind of challenge. The design work was done by someone else, for decisions that were made before you arrived, and you are now responsible for something you did not build and may only partially understand. The guidelines exist, or most of them do. The assets are somewhere. And the brand has been in use long enough to have drifted in ways that are not documented anywhere.

The first thing to do is not redesign. It is audit: find out what the brand is supposed to be, what it has actually become, and where the gap is widest.

What is a brand audit for?

A brand audit is not a creative review. You are not judging whether the brand is good. You are establishing the current state of the brand across every touchpoint, so you know what you are actually working with.

This matters especially when you are new. The previous team's informal knowledge, what colours they really used, what the logo handling actually was, what the voice felt like in practice, is now gone. The guidelines are your map, but the territory has moved, and you need to know by how much before you start giving direction.

Step 1: Get everything in one place

Before you can audit, you need to see the full picture. Collect every version of the brand materials you can find: the guidelines document (and any older versions), the master logo files, the font files or links, the most recent external communications, the social media archive, the templates used for decks and documents, and any assets produced by external freelancers or agencies in the last two years.

You are looking for multiplicity. If there are three versions of the logo file and two different guidelines documents, that is already a finding.

Step 2: Check the colour

Colour is the first place drift appears, because it is the easiest thing to get wrong and the hardest to notice when it is slightly off.

Pull the exact colour values from the guidelines: hex codes, RGB, CMYK. Then find those values in recent materials. Check a mix of channels: the website, the most recent social posts, a presentation deck, a printed piece if there is one. Are the values consistent? Are there variations that should not exist?

Common findings: the hex in the guidelines is not what the website is using. The print CMYK produces a noticeably different colour than the digital RGB. Someone introduced a slightly lighter version of the primary colour at some point and it stuck.

Step 3: Check logo handling

Collect every version of the logo in active use, across every context. Website header, email signature, social profile images, presentation decks, printed collateral. Compare each against the guidelines.

What to look for: versions that have been stretched, squeezed, or recoloured. Logos placed on backgrounds that create contrast or legibility problems. Outdated versions still in circulation alongside newer ones. The wordmark used where the symbol should be, or the reverse.

The logo is often the last thing to drift visually, because it is recognisable enough that obvious deviations get noticed. But subtle mishandling is common: wrong clear space, wrong minimum size, wrong treatment on colour backgrounds.

Step 4: Check typography

Typography is where many brands quietly accumulate deviation, because type decisions are made inside documents and software that have their own defaults.

Identify the specified typefaces. Then check whether those typefaces are actually what is in use: in the website CSS, in the PowerPoint templates, in the email signature, in the PDFs. Common findings: the primary typeface is specified but the heading font in the deck template is the wrong weight. A fallback font was used once and became the de facto standard.

Also check for consistency in use: are headings, body copy, and captions being used to the specification? Or has the hierarchy been quietly reinterpreted?

Step 5: Check templates and decks

Templates are where the brand lives in practice for most of the people who use it. A slide deck template that is wrong perpetuates every error it contains across hundreds of files.

Find the current deck template. Check it against the guidelines: colours, fonts, logo placement, margins, image treatment. Then find a presentation made from it in the last six months and check that too, because templates are often edited by users in ways that persist.

This is often where the largest gap appears, because templates are used constantly but reviewed rarely.

Step 6: Check voice and social

Voice drift is harder to see than visual drift, but it accumulates in the same way. Read a sample of recent social posts, email communications, website copy, and any written materials produced by different people on the team.

What does the brand actually sound like in practice? Compare it against the voice section of the guidelines. Is it more formal or more casual than specified? Does it use phrases or vocabulary the guidelines would rule out? Has the tone shifted to match a particular channel in a way that has become the brand's default?

Voice drift often goes undocumented because it is subjective and harder to measure. But it is usually visible when you read materials from eighteen months ago alongside what is being produced now.

What to do with what you find

After the audit, you have a clear picture of the gap between the brand as specified and the brand as it actually exists. The next step is to triage: which deviations matter most (the ones that are most visible, most frequent, or most at odds with the intended perception), and which can be corrected gradually as new materials are produced.

Most inherited brands do not need a redesign. They need a correction and a system that prevents the same drift from accumulating again, because the reason it accumulated in the first place was that no one had a way to catch it before it shipped.

Your brand is worth protecting, including the one you inherited. Brand Atlas holds the identity in one place and runs the Oswald on-brand check so that what ships matches what the brand is supposed to be. See how it works.

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