so i've been doing brand identity work for about 5 years now and had a bit of a wake up moment recently that made me realise my process for actually handing off a completed brand to a client was not as good as i thought it was.

i always focused a lot on the quality of the work itself. the strategy, the positioning, the visual identity. spent hours getting the details right. but the actual delivery at the end? honestly i just threw everything into a google drive folder, named the folders in a way that made sense to me, and sent the link. that was it. job done, move on.

the wake up moment came when i was doing a brand audit for a client who wanted to refresh their identity a bit. asked them to share their existing brand assets so i could understand what they had. what came back was a mess. they had logo files in about four different places, two of which were outdated versions from a designer they'd worked with two years earlier. nobody in the company knew which was the official current version. their marketing person was using one logo, their website had a slightly different one, and the guy who made their trade show banners had apparently just used whichever he could find first.

and here's the thing - talking to the client, they said their previous designer had sent everything over properly at the time. it just got lost. the drive link stopped working at some point, someone saved a copy somewhere else, someone else found an old version from an email and thought that was it. the original designer had done the work fine. the handoff just hadnt created any kind of lasting access.

i sat with that for a while because i realised i'd probably caused the same problem for my own clients without knowing it.

had a bit of a rethink and started looking for a better way to handle this. found a tool called BrandKity that is basically built for this specific thing - you create a dedicated page for each client with all their brand assets organised and accessible. logos in every format, colors, fonts, files. clients get a link that doesnt expire and they can always come back to it and share it with whoever is working on their brand.

started using it for new projects and also went back and set it up retroactively for some older clients. one of them replied saying they'd been meaning to ask me to resend the files for months and were really relieved to finally have it all in one place.

anyway. not sure if others here have had similar realisations but the handoff really is part of the work. the brand you made doesnt do its job if the client loses access to it six months later

[supprimé]

so this happened about a year ago and i think about it way more than i should.

i'm a freelance brand designer, mostly logo and identity work for small businesses. i'd been freelancing for about 2 years at this point and thought i had a pretty decent process. do the work, deliver the files in a google drive folder, send the brand guidelines pdf, done. move on to the next project.

anyway i had a client, a local bakery, nice people. i'd done their full branding like 10 months earlier - logo, colors, fonts, the whole thing. thought the project was wrapped and forgotten about.

then one day i get a whatsapp message from the owner. she's really polite about it but basically says her nephew who runs their instagram had been using a totally different logo. not the one i made. he'd apparently found some old version in an email from before we started working together and had been using that one for months. like their instagram had 400 posts with the wrong branding.

and the thing that stung was i couldnt even be mad because it was kinda my fault? like i delivered everything to her via google drive but she didnt know how to use it really, and neither did her nephew. the folder was disorganised, the file names made sense to me but not to a non-designer, and the link had probably just gotten buried in her email after a few weeks.

felt genuinely bad about it. called her and apologised. sorted out the correct files for the nephew. but it made me sit down and really rethink how i handle delivery.

started looking for something purpose built for this because generic cloud storage clearly wasnt working. eventually came across a tool called BrandKity - basically you set up a page for the client with their logos in every format, the exact color codes, fonts, all their files. you share one permanent link. thats it. client bookmarks it and can always find everything themselves.

it's not fancy, its not trying to be figma or anything like that. it just solves the specific problem of clients not being able to find their own brand assets after you deliver them.

i've been using it ever since and that specific problem has not happened again. i send the link at the end of every project now and tell the client this is where your brand lives, share this with anyone who works on your brand.

anyway. lesson learned. the delivery is part of the work, not an afterthought. the most beautifully designed logo in the world doesnt help if the client cant find it 6 months later