The rules that nobody follows.
We've now read 2000 don'ts within brand guidelines, and we genuinely believe nobody writes a "don't" for fun. Each prohibition is a confession, a rule that only gets written down after someone already broke it. So we treated every misuse section we could find as a diary of brand anxiety.
Mission statements are your aspiration and don'ts are your evidence.
A brand's values page tells you who they want to be. Their misuse section tells you who someone already tried to be, with the brand's logo stapled to it. "Do not place the logo on people's heads", a statement in one of our guidelines, only exists because someone once did it.
So this issue flips the format. Instead of "here's what brands do," it's "here's what brands are afraid of", broken down the same way, by discipline. The designer's fears live in logos and color. The copywriter's fears live in the words they've had to ban outright. And the strategist's fears are the quiet ones — the rules about who a brand can be seen with.
Copy still edges out logo, but logo is closing the gap fast.
The logo is the most fragile object in branding.
Don't stretch it, skew it, rotate it, crop it, recolor it, artmaxxing it, outline it, fill it with a photo, or put it on objects. One sports league bans its icon from ever appearing next to its own wordmark — the two halves of one logo, forbidden from meeting.
A banned-words list is basically a brand's trauma history.
Multiple guidelines in our sample went as far as naming individual words that are no longer allowed. Here's a sample — read them and you get a portrait of every HR memo and hype-copy disaster that came before this document existed.
Somewhere, a founder wrote "world's only" in a headline and everyone in the room felt something.
The don'ts that aren't about design at all. These are about liability, culture, and control.
Don't look political. Don't look like anywhere in particular.
One global EV brand bans "overt regional or national identity styling" and any politically charged visuals outright. Being everywhere means being from nowhere.
Don't use "@" or "X" for gender-neutral Spanish.
One guideline explicitly bans writing "tod@s" instead of the standard masculine-neuter form, adding: "we don't need to force a show of inclusiveness." It's a stance, stated more plainly than most brands would ever put in a values deck.
Don't promise, don't guarantee and don't sound like you're guaranteeing.
A fintech guideline separately bans "guaranteed" language, stress-free promises, overpromising emotional outcomes, and fear-based urgency: four different rules converging on one instinct — legal read something scary once.
Don't write anything you wouldn't sign your name to.
One energy company's copywriting checklist boils an entire compliance process down to a single gut-check: "Are you proud? Ask yourself if you'd want to put your name on this letter." It's the most human line in any style guide in this dataset.
Chance you'd guess correctly — one EV brand shows six wrong versions of its own name in its guideline. Only one capitalization is right.
If a rule is this specific, it's an incident report.
Brand Guideline Don't Bingo
Every square is a real rule from a real guideline in this dataset. Open your next brand review and mark one off every time you hear it out loud.
How to play
Click a square when you catch that rule getting invoked — in a design review, a client call, or your own inbox. Five in a row (any direction) wins.
The center square is always free, because at this point, someone has already broken every rule on this card.
- New card — deals a fresh shuffle from the full rule pool
- Clear marks — keeps your card, wipes your progress
- Copy my card — grabs a text version for Slack
How we got here
The data in this issue comes from an ongoing manual audit of misuse / "don't" sections across brand guidelines hosted on Corebook.io. Because thousands of brand guidelines live on their platform, Corebook has a rare, broad view of how creative teams across industries document brand identity don'ts. Category percentages reflect the distinct rules we've catalogued so far, not the full platform.
Sign up for the next issue
This newsletter is put together by Brandisaverb™ — a platform for research, insights, and discussion on branding and visual identity.
