Over the years I have worked for a fair few companies that have invested considerable expense and time creating brand guideline books for them to not be used in

Over the years I have worked for a fair few companies that have invested considerable expense and time creating brand guideline books for them to not be used in practice. The most recent one that I was subjected to was interesting but it did not apply to the web. At no project meetings, e.g. for that new carousel (!) on the home page for that new season of products did anyone rock up with the official brand guideline book and refer to it. This did not mean that things were inconsistent on the site, it just was not what was needed. Part of the problem in this incident was that the person that slaved away at the brand guideline effort was from a print background. You just have realities of minimum font size and how tall your logo can be when designing for the web. After a while that expensive, paid for (and therefore developer unfriendly) font gets binned and beyond the logo some system fonts with no funky kerning get used instead. Having colours specified in CMYK is fine but where was the RGB hexcode? I could be wrong but I think there was also this 'point size' going on, which is interesting if you are using ems, variable width fonts and whatnot, pixel measurements being almost as quaint as 'point sizes'. So this was a well meaning anecdotal company style guide, written by the lorem-ipsum shapes-on-a-page posse and handed down to the web team and other departments for nobody to use it. In this incident I would like to have changed things around a bit, however, at the time, due to technical debt, on the web team we had strictly 'add to' CSS and that was based on bloat that some agency had burdened the company with. Really the best option would have been to have ditched the print emphasis and legacy thoughts on what brand guidelines should be, to then make a fresh start with a company CSS stylesheet instead. This no longer needs to be bloat for legacy browsers it could be succinct, designed for accessibility and with 'print' being one of many media queries that it caters for. Need a box for the products? Design it with some tool that loads the stylesheet and use the styles. Better still, a SCSS stylesheet with lots and lots of comments in it and version control. Then the brand guideline book could be something that prints good and is also accessible online. I know that the lorem-ipsum department would question this and how that they really need CMYK to get that special gold foil embossed on the box with 'bleed' and stuff set according to how Quark Express did it in 1983, I would also fully expect management to go with that established opinion. I would also imagine that the lorem-ipsum department would not understand 'CSS variables' or 'CSS Grid margins' or want to hear about 'CSS variable fonts', none of it is shiny. But design is how it works and the venerated manuals of yore were very much about design, design being 'how it works' but in the medium of the day. Today's pastiches by lorem-ipsumists are not with the times and not for the medium of the web. Companies are smaller and just don't have the inclination to get a proper agency to do a proper job.