Marit Halvorsen
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Pro edition

Audit Method.

Ten days, eighteen months after delivery. The hardest part is not the counting — it is not choosing the evidence, which is the failure mode that makes most identity audits worthless and every one of them flattering.

Where the evidence comes from

  1. Photograph everything, badlyA phone, two days, every landing and every vessel. Bad photographs of real applications beat good photographs of chosen ones, and choosing is the whole failure mode of this exercise.
  2. Ask for the ugly folderEvery organisation has one — the notices, the temporary signs, the thing somebody made in a hurry. It is the most useful artefact in the building and nobody offers it.
  3. The printer, the sign shop, the embroidererFifteen minutes each on the phone. They will tell you exactly which rule is impossible and they have been waiting eighteen months for somebody to ask.
  4. The office template folderWhat people actually open on a Tuesday. If your letterhead is not in it, your letterhead does not exist.
  5. Search your own markImage search, social, the client’s own site. Third-party applications you never sanctioned are the cleanest test of whether a mark survives without you.

How to count without lying to yourself

  1. Count applications, not instancesOne notice printed 400 times is one application. Counting impressions makes a hold rate look wonderful and tells you nothing about which rules work.
  2. Count what you can seeIf a rule cannot be checked from the evidence, it does not get a number. Two of the ten rules on the public page have small counts for exactly that reason and the honest thing is to leave them small.
  3. Held means held completelyNearly-correct is broken. A rule that is 80% followed is a rule that is being interpreted, which is a different failure and a more interesting one.
  4. Attribute the break, not the blameEvery break traces to a person doing their job with what they had. The rule is what failed. Writing it up any other way ends the client relationship and teaches nobody anything.
  5. Publish the denominatorThirty-one held of thirty-one applied is not a strong rule; it is an untested one. Rule 9 on the public page was deleted precisely because its denominator was meaningless.

Four ways this becomes a sales document

The audit that finds no problems
It happened because the designer chose the evidence. If two days of photographs produce nothing to change, the photographs were taken in the wrong places.
The audit that recommends more work
Every finding conveniently requiring a new engagement. The test is whether the report ever deletes anything, and this one is passed by deleting rules rather than by adding recommendations.
The audit that blames the client
"Compliance was poor." Compliance is an output of the guideline, not an input. If five of seven people never opened the document, the document is the thing that failed.
The audit that arrives as a deck
Forty slides read once. The deliverable is a revised one-page rule sheet and a list of deletions, which is a smaller and much harder document to write.

Ten days

Six blocks, and the last one deletes more than it adds
WhenWhat happens
Day 1–2On site. Photographs, the ugly folder, the template folder.
Day 3Five phone calls to whoever actually makes things.
Day 4–6Counting. One row per application, one column per rule, no interpretation yet.
Day 7The first pass at verdicts, deliberately harsh, then left alone overnight.
Day 8–9Rewrites. Every rewritten rule gets re-tested against the same evidence.
Day 10The revised one-page sheet, the deletion list, and the files that changed. Nothing else is delivered.