# You Don’t Need a Tank&\#8230; You Need a Brand System.

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Last modified: 2026-09-30T13:02:25+00:00

## Description

Picture the scene, a client reaches out needing a website refresh. Nothing unusual there. The business has grown, the site was built a few years ago, competitors are beginning to look sharper and somebody has finally decided it’s time to sort it out. They’re not looking for a grand strategic exercise. They just want a better website. So I have questions; What does the current brand look like? They have a logo. Great. Is there a brand guide? Not really, although somebody produced one years ago and there might be a PDF somewhere. What colours are we working with? There’s definitely a blue, although the website blue is slightly different from the PowerPoint blue and the sales team seem to use another one. Which fonts? Whatever was installed when the presentation templates were made. Photography? A mixture of stock, staff photographs and images accumulated over the years. Tone of voice? Professional, probably. Friendly too. Although the sales material sounds quite different from the website. None of this is particularly alarming. In fact, it is incredibly normal. But twenty minutes into a conversation about rebuilding a website, we aren’t really talking about a website anymore. We’re talking about branding. The website has simply become the place where all the little decisions the organisation has been making independently for years suddenly have to sit next to each other. And this isn’t client ignorance. Far from it. Often the branding stage gets overlooked because the meaty, exciting and most visible parts seem to come afterwards. I tend to think of it a little like tanks and tin soldiers. "The tin soldiers are doing most of the everyday work. They’re organising things, holding positions, creating structure and doing all of the relatively unglamorous jobs that ultimately win the war. Then a tank comes rumbling through. It blows a great big hole in something, everybody turns to look at it and, more often than not, everybody remembers the tank." Websites, campaigns, glossy brochures and big launch assets are the tanks. They’re visible. They’re exciting. They’re the things people circulate internally and proudly send to clients. The brand system is the army quietly making sure the tank knows which direction it is supposed to be travelling in. A logo isn't a brand system Logos are important, obviously. But asking a logo to do all the heavy lifting for a brand is a little unfair on the poor thing. A useful brand system extends much further. It establishes a visual language through colour, typography, imagery, composition, graphic devices and layout behaviour. It establishes how photography should feel, how graphics interact, what information gets prominence and how an identity adapts when it moves from a business card to a 40-foot exhibition wall. But the less visible parts are often just as important. How does the organisation describe itself? Which words does it repeatedly use? Which words does it avoid? Is the language formal, technical, conversational, disruptive or reassuring? What is the actual positioning behind the visuals? What should someone understand about the organisation after encountering it for ten seconds? Those decisions are branding too. Without them, every new piece of collateral becomes a tiny reinvention exercise. One agency makes the website. Another creates the exhibition graphics. Somebody internally builds the PowerPoint. A freelancer produces a social campaign. Six months later everyone has technically used the logo, yet somehow none of it quite looks or sounds like it belongs to the same organisation. That’s usually not a design-quality problem. It’s a system problem. The website shouldn't have to invent the brand Websites tend to expose this particularly quickly because they force so many brand decisions into one place. A website needs: headings, body copy, imagery, navigation language, buttons, forms, colour relationships, spacing conventions, motion, hierarchy and hundreds of smaller interface choices. When a brand system already exi

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