Nobody on your team wakes up wanting to break the brand. That's exactly what makes it so hard to stop.
Brand inconsistency almost never comes from sabotage. It comes from well-meaning people making small decisions that gradually pull a brand off course — a swapped font here, a close-enough blue there — none of which feels like a problem in the moment.
The brand font "felt a little heavy for this one," so they quietly brought in something they had lying around; usually the exact typeface your guidelines exist to prevent. One deck later, it's spreading.
The fix: Turn on Font control to limit font choices to your approved brand fonts. The contraband doesn't make the cut.
They didn't reach for the wrong blue on purpose. They eyedroppered "basically the same" blue off a photo, or typed a hex from memory that's two shades off. To them it's identical. To your brand, it's a slow leak.
The fix: Turn on Color control to limit color choices to your approved brand colors, so "close enough" stops being the easy option.
Handed a space that's slightly the wrong shape, they grab the logo by the corner and stretch. Or shrink it past legibility. Or drop it on a background it was never meant to touch. The logo survives; your standards don't.
The fix: Apply a full lock to the logo in your Brand Templates. A full lock prevents changes entirely, while a partial lock allows limited edits — so use the full lock on the one asset you can least afford to mangle, and it stays exactly as drawn.
The outside contractor or agency nobody onboarded. They're working from a brand PDF and their best guess, because they were never given access to the actual Brand Kit. They're not going rogue — they're flying blind.
The fix: Stop making them guess. Give external partners the appropriate access to your approved Brand Kits, templates, and assets. How you scope that access depends on your organization's security and permissions model — but the goal is simple: they should be building from your real assets, not eyeballing a document.
Never starts from scratch. Why would they? Last year's deck is right there. So they duplicate it — old logo, retired palette, and every off-brand choice baked in — and quietly ship your branding as it looked eighteen months ago.
The fix: Give them something faster to grab. Build Brand Templates and archive the old files so the quickest option to copy is also the on-brand one. (You read this one last issue. It's that important.)
The trickiest, because they mean well. They nudge the grid to "make it breathe," bump the header size, move things around until it "pops." Every tweak is tiny and defensible. Fifty tweaks later, no two pieces look like they came from the same company.
The fix: Lock the layout, leave the content open. Fix the position and size of the structural elements in your Brand Templates; let people swap copy, images, and data freely. They get room to work. Your grid survives their improvements.
One glance, one action each. (Font and Color control live under Brand Controls; locking lives in your Brand Templates.)
Notice the pattern: not one of these six is a bad actor. They're just people trying to get work done without guardrails — and every fix above is the same move in a different costume. Make on-brand the easy path, and the gallery quietly empties out.
Which of these have you seen most often? (No names necessary.)
Schedule a short conversation to explore what may make sense for your team.