One casual day at work our CEO mentioned he wanted to version everything. To use “version” as a verb, he wanted to create a kind of software that we could push incremental updates with attribution or roll back to previous iterations to avoid errors or mishaps. Of course this makes sense: we make software and are perpetually maintaining, updating, fixing, and shipping changes. Versioning is how those changes are documented.
Traditional software, as we think of it, comes from a publisher and solves a problem. For instance, Excel is published by Microsoft as a spreadsheet with computation capabilities; LinkedIn is a software also published by Microsoft (oddly enough) to connect professionals online.
This makes total sense, this is obvious, but his stress on versioning everything immediately made me think of our brand. And then of course, of all brands.
What does it mean to version control a brand and how can that practically be implemented?
At Census, we applied this simple version sequence: the logo is the first integer; the color is second; the typography is third; styles and art direction are fourth. As of January 11, 2023, our current brand version is 02.04.06.04.
I retrofit our old brand (before I started), new brand, and all of its updates through time. Version 01.01.01.01 would be the day Census was born: initial logo, first colors, basic fonts, and any general art direction across marketing, web, ads, etc. We launched a new brand in early-mid-2022 with all the new assets: new logo, new fonts, colors, the works (which would yield version 02.02.02.02). After almost two years we are currently at version 02.04.06.04.
Here is our current brand version log. You can see its progress over time. In the future, dates will be associated with each update—unfortunately, as I said, this was retrofit and I skipped out on proper dating entirely.
I have no idea if this is going to work or if this is going to last. I hope it can set the tone for more accurate brand management but I also realize starting something new means it might not hold or might require some major reworking in the next few months.
I realize this also omits things like mission, vision, and voice. I’d love to better understand how to version control a brand beyond just logo changes. This concept is still only a seed.
Feel free to steal this idea and make with it what you will. And please let me know what can be improved and what flaws you think are inherent.
As with anything, only time will tell.
