Brand Consistency is BS

_{Day 80/100}

Hey—It's Tim. 

It’s 2am. I have the Penfriend site open on my laptop. The production app open on my tablet, and I’ve been playing in figma with a bunch of new product designs…

They look... different. But should they?

Nobody warned me about this existential brand crisis. NOBODY.

It’s even worse when you’re the entire marketing department AND the product design team.

Do I need the same font everywhere?
Same colors?
Same spacing?

And how far does this consistency rabbit hole go?

Should our marketing emails match our newsletter?
Should our LinkedIn carousels match our onboarding flow?
Should my coffee mug match our hero section?

I don't fuckin' know.
I have so many questions.
I just want to go to sleep.

The Brand Identity Crisis

Here’s what I’ve worked out so far. Everyone is just making it all up. Mostly.

Those big companies with their 72-page brand guides?
Half of them ignore their own rules. The other half spend more time arguing about whether their blue is blue enough than actually building something people want.

I've watched designers have near-mental breakdowns over 2-pixel differences that literally no human would ever notice.

Meanwhile, the companies crushing it are the ones who know when consistency matters and when it's just self-indulgent overthinking.

I've watched Figma ignore its own style guide to experiment with new landing pages that convert better. I've seen Notion completely overhaul its visual identity mid-growth and still dominate. And remember when Slack changed its logo and everyone lost their minds for exactly three days before moving on?

My half-baked survival rules

I've created some guardrails to keep me sane:

1. Two main fonts. That's it.

2. Two accent colors (plus their variants when I need them).

3. An 8-pixel spacing grid because some UX person once told me this was gospel.

Everything else? I sketch it on my tablet, try to make it feel "Pen" and "Friend", show it to Inge, and hit publish before I can overthink it.

I've stared at font pairings so long they've lost all meaning.
I've questioned whether our blue is "friendly enough" at 3 AM.
I've wondered if our buttons should be more... buttony?

But here's what I've realized:

People don't give a shit about your pixel-perfect spacing system. They don't email support because your newsletter font is different from your app font.

But they do care about feeling.

They notice when something feels "off-brand" even if they can't articulate why. They notice when an email lands in their inbox and they instantly know it's yours before even seeing the logo.

That's not about identical hex codes or font weights. It's about consistent vibes.

It's the difference between McDonald's and a random fast food joint. You know what you're getting at McDonald's - not because the packaging is identical worldwide, but because the experience carries a consistent feel.

Here’s the new problem I have. Making it “feel” right, and shipping fast. But, that is a problem and newsletter for another day.

For now, at least, it’s the brand consistency I’m fighting for.
The rest is just learning anxiety.

The main thing I’ve been going by is to
Build something that feels unmistakably mine.

✌️ Tim "Consistently Inconsistent" Hanson
CMO @Penfriend.ai

Same brain, different platforms: X, Threads, LinkedIn.

P.S. For the record, turns out yes. You should use the same font in your app as your site and newsletter and marketing emails and onboarding and.. and.. and..

P.P.S. To the one person that voted the last 5 newsletters as “subpar”. I see you, and thanks for the engagement :D

Penfriend.ai
Made by content marketers. Used by better ones.