Insight
Court
A friend came to me last week, frustrated. She’s a smart, thoughtful in-house creative, working in a marketing-led team. She’d designed something that followed the brand guidelines to a tee, fonts, colours, layout, you get the drill.
Her feedback? 'The vibe’s not right. Can we change the fonts and colours?' Just like that, years of carefully crafted guidelines were tossed aside in favour of something more… felt. I totally hear her irritation, but it does raise a bigger question, are we entering a post-guideline era? Is ‘vibe’ the new brand bible?
We used to say design is about problem-solving. Now we hear things like: 'it doesn’t feel premium enough', 'the energy's not right' and 'it's just not giving'.
Designers are being asked to create emotion, not just structure. And in many ways, that’s a good thing. Brand isn’t static anymore, it’s fluid, social, context-sensitive. We’re designing for screens, scrolls, and moods, not billboards and brochures.
So yes, for sure vibe matters. It’s what makes a brand feel alive. It’s what gets screenshotted, shared, and remembered. You don’t always remember the exact logo, but you remember the feeling something gave you.
Not even close. They're not the enemy, they’re the scaffolding. They’re the foundation for a brand to build recognisability and scale creative across teams. Without them, you get chaos.
But here’s the issue, most brand guidelines weren’t built for flex. They were made for control, not expression. So when someone says 'the vibe’s off', what they’re often reacting to is the gap between the brand’s real-world energy and the creative system built to support it.
It's not either/or.
This isn’t about choosing one or the other. It’s about evolving the relationship between the two. The guidelines are there to codify who you are, whereas a vibe is how people feel when they meet you. The magic happens when the system is built for vibe, when you design not just for consistency, but for expression, energy, stretch.
That means your toolkit needs range. Tone needs flexibility, colour palette might need some seasonal or cultural variation and your typography needs a way to dial things up or down.
Vibe without structure is chaotic and structure without vibe is dead.
Next time someone says 'the vibes off?'
Interrogate the gap.
What specifically feels off?
Is it a mismatch of tone?
Is the context asking for more energy, more softness, more heat?
Is the system not built to flex enough?
Sometimes the solution is bending the rules or expanding them. Other times it’s realising your brand system needs an update.
But if people keep overriding a design in the name of ‘vibe’? That’s not a failure of the creative, maybe its time your guidelines caught up.
