I have had enough. I've spent a good chunk of my career nodding politely while a brand guideline told me to do something daft. Excessive use of all caps, color combinations that are unreadable and a complete lack of visual hierarchy in typography. I have seen all kinds of horrors and for a long time I went along with it, because questioning the brand felt a bit like questioning someone's child.

Lately, though, I've run out of patience.

I keep meeting people who use their brand as a reason not to change anything. The logo is sacred. The colors are locked. The fonts came down from a mountain on stone tablets. So the brand ends up quietly undermining the business completely untouched, because nobody wants to open that particular Pandora's box.

A brand is not a mood board

Don't get me wrong, I think branding matters enormously. Get your visual identity right, and it can shape whether an organization sinks or swims. I'm not one of those people who thinks design is decoration you sprinkle on at the end.

But a good brand has to earn its keep. It has to work in the real world, on a real phone, for a real person squinting at the screen in bright sunlight. Looking pretty isn't the job. Looking pretty while also being legible, scannable, and accessible is what matters.

This is where a lot of brands fall down. Somebody picked a color palette in a quiet studio on a lovely big monitor. It looked gorgeous. Then it hit the website, where it has to convince a distracted human to actually do something, and it fell apart.

The web is an afterthought, and it shows

Most branding is now seen online. That's where the majority of people meet your brand. Yet most branding agencies I come across still don't approach the work with a digital-first mindset.

Oh sure, they'll tell you they know about digital. They might even include the odd mock-up for a website or a social media platform. But they're not specialists in usability or conversion, and the gaps in their knowledge shine through. And they do zero testing, despite having access to all the same testing tools the rest of us in UX use every day.

They design for the brochure, the business card, and the launch presentation. The website is treated as one more place to paste the logo. So you get text baked into images, type that's beautiful at poster size and unreadable on mobile, and a palette that looks confident on a wall and washed out on a screen.

It's a slightly depressing way to build something that lives mostly online.

What this actually costs you

I've had two clients recently where the visual branding was genuinely not fit for purpose.

In one case it failed on accessibility. It flunked the legal tests, sure, but it also let people down in a simpler way. They just couldn't read it easily.

In the other, the brand was all over the place. It may well have started life as a decent identity, but years of inconsistent use had distorted it beyond recognition. Different rules on every page, no hierarchy, and nothing to guide the eye.

The symptoms are always familiar. There are walls of capital letters, which have been shown to cut readability by as much as 20%. There are color combinations that make body copy hard work. There's no typographic hierarchy, so headlines and sections blur together. And there are no visual containers, so the whole page becomes a soup of elements with nothing pulling your attention anywhere.

None of these feels like a disaster on its own. Stack them up and you get a page that quietly repels the very people you spent a fortune attracting.

The bit that tends to land

Clients don't always take my word for this, which is fair enough. So recently I ran two versions of a homepage through an AI attention tool. The current brand-compliant design, and a tweaked version of mine.

The numbers were uncomfortable for the brand identity and the existing website. Clarity and focus both climbed by around 20% in the new version. Predicted engagement with the main call to action jumped by more than 80%.

Same content, same offer. The only real difference was loosening the grip of a brand that was fighting the reader instead of helping them.

That's the conversation I would encourage you to have. Not "is the brand sacred," but "is the brand costing us more than it benefits us." At some point you have to decide which matters more. Honoring a set of brand assets that were never designed for the web, or actually converting the people who land on your site.

What to do about it

You don't need to burn the brand to the ground. That's rarely the answer, and it's rarely on the table anyway.

Start small. Look at where the brand and basic readability are openly at war. Look for restrictive layouts, poor image choice, low-contrast text, and headlines you can't tell apart from the body copy. Fix those first, and you'll usually claw back most of the benefit without getting into a complete rebranding exercise.

While you're at it, do the testing those branding agencies never bother with. You don't need a big research budget for it. A couple of cheap, practical checks will tell you most of what you need to know:

A semantic differential survey, to see whether the brand actually communicates the values you think it does rather than the ones you hope it does.
Accessibility and readability testing, to see whether it genuinely works on a screen rather than just in a presentation.

Then push for one slightly braver conversation. Ask whether the brand was ever really designed for the screen, or just retrofitted onto it. If the honest answer is the second one, you've got a case for a proper digital-first refresh rather than another round of polishing something that doesn't work.

And if you're the one clutching the brand guidelines like a holy relic, I'd gently suggest having a word with yourself. I've been that person. The brand is meant to serve the business, not the other way around. The moment it starts costing you customers, it's stopped doing its job, however nice it looks in a style guide.