Social Media Guidelines That Teams Actually Use
Lessons from building visual guidelines for the National Center for Environmental Compliance.
Omar FawziSenior Art Director, Riyadh · 
Many organisations have a brand book that nobody opens. When the National Center for Environmental Compliance needed a unified visual system for its social media, covering awareness, institutional updates, national occasions and seasonal campaigns, the goal was simple: guidelines the team would use every day.
Start from the content, not the logo
We listed every type of post the centre publishes: announcements, awareness messages, events, national days. Each type got its own template. A guideline organised around real content is far easier to use than one organised around abstract rules.
Templates beat rules
A rule says "keep 40 pixels of margin". A template simply has the margin built in. Wherever possible, we turned rules into ready-made files, so the right choice was also the easiest one.
Plan for occasions
Saudi Founding Day, National Day and seasonal campaigns come every year. Designing flexible templates for them in advance keeps the identity consistent on the days when everyone else is posting too.
Keep it short
The best guideline fits on a few pages: colours, type, templates, do and do not. Anything longer becomes a document people avoid.
The real test
A guideline works when the team can produce a correct post on a busy day without asking the designer. That is what we design for.