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Fill in this workbook as you go. Each section has a “Concept review” dropdown underneath it. These explain the concept behind the section, not a rule to follow. Your brand might land somewhere different than the examples show, and that’s fine. Examples throughout use Doughnut Labs, a SaaS company that sells disruptive Doughnut Technology. Delete the grayed example text as you fill each section in.
This page records what the files are and who may use them. The rules for how they may be used live in visual identity and logo usage.
1

Name one source of truth first

Everything else on this page depends on there being a single place the current file lives.
2

Fill in the register

An asset with no owner and no location is one somebody will recreate from scratch.
3

Record rights alongside the file

Licensing questions arrive at the moment of use. Answering them in the same table stops that becoming a separate hunt.
4

Set review dates as you go

A register with no review dates is accurate on the day it’s written and degrades from there.

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Core sections

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1. Source of truth

Where do the current files live, and what is the rule about using files from anywhere else? E.g. Everything approved lives in the Doughnut Labs brand folder in Google Drive, mirrored to a public press kit for logos only. Files pulled from a deck, a screenshot, a website, or an email attachment are not approved, however recent they look. If it isn’t in the brand folder, it isn’t current.
Duplicate copies are the mechanism by which a brand quietly goes out of date. A file gets attached to an email, saved to a desktop, dropped into a shared deck, and each copy keeps working long after the original has been replaced. Nothing signals to the person holding the copy that it’s stale.A single location only holds when it’s convenient. If the approved path is slower than reusing a file someone already has, the copies win, and the register becomes a description of what should be happening.Brands differ on how open that location should be. A fully public press kit removes almost all friction and removes control over who downloads what. A gated system does the reverse. Most end up splitting the two, with the logo treated as public and everything else gated.

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2. Asset register

One row per asset. Add rows for whatever the brand actually holds.
The owner column carries more weight than it appears to. An asset without a named owner has no one to ask when it needs updating, no one to notice when it’s wrong, and no one to say yes or no to an unusual request. It ends up maintained by whoever last happened to touch it.Review cadence differs by what actually drives an asset out of date, which is why one blanket schedule tends not to fit. A logo changes when the brand changes, which is rare. Product screenshots go stale every time the interface ships. Photography can expire on a date fixed by a consent form regardless of whether anyone looks at it.A register is also the only practical way to answer “does this exist?” Without one, the default answer is to remake the thing, which is how a brand ends up with four slightly different versions of the same diagram.

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3. File formats

Naming E.g. Files follow the pattern doughnutlabs_logo_primary_mono-light_2026.svg: brand, asset, variant, color version, year. Lowercase, underscores between fields, hyphens inside a field, no spaces. See file naming conventions.
Supplying several formats of the same asset is a way of removing a conversion step from whoever uses it. A person who needs a print-ready logo and finds only a PNG will either convert it badly or ask, and the conversion is the more common outcome.Separating master files from exports matters for a different reason. A master is editable, which means it’s also breakable, and a version that’s been edited by three people in three tools has usually drifted from the original without anyone deciding to change it. Keeping masters out of general circulation costs an export step and prevents that.Naming does its work at the moment of retrieval. A name carrying the variant and the year lets someone confirm they have the right file without opening it, which is exactly the check people skip when the filename is logo_final_v3.

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4. Access

Access controls here are aimed less at secrecy than at preventing accidental edits to shared originals. Most brand files are not confidential. What causes damage is a master being overwritten by someone who meant to save a copy, and the version history nobody checks until months later.The agency row is where access most often outlives its purpose. Permissions granted for a project tend to remain after the project ends, because revoking them is nobody’s task. Tying expiry to the contract at the point of granting is what avoids relying on someone to remember.How far to open the view layer is a real trade-off. Broad visibility means people find what exists and reuse it. Narrow visibility means fewer files leaking into places nobody tracks. Which cost is worse depends on how much of the brand is public anyway.

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5. Rights and licensing

Who checks rights before an asset is used in paid media? E.g. The person building the campaign checks this table. Anything marked with a restriction or an expiry goes to the brand lead before it runs.
Rights problems surface at the point of scale, not at the point of use. An image sits fine on a blog post for a year and becomes a problem the day it runs as a paid ad, because the license was scoped to something the ad exceeded. Nothing about the file changes; the use does.The expiry column is the part with a real deadline attached. A consent release with an end date keeps working technically long after it has stopped working legally, and the file gives no indication. This is the single most common reason a register needs a date field.Where brands differ is in how much they buy up front. Full buyouts cost more and remove the tracking burden entirely. Scoped licenses cost less and require somebody to keep checking. Neither is wrong, but choosing the second without assigning the checking to a person is how the cost shows up later anyway.

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6. Versioning and retirement

How is a new version released, and what happens to the old one? E.g. The new file is uploaded to the brand folder with the year in the filename, and the previous version moves to /brand/archive with _retired appended. Retired files are kept for reference and never used in new work. Retiring anything used externally is announced in the team channel with a date by which the old version should be gone. What’s currently retired, and where do old versions still appear?
Replacing an asset is fast. Removing the previous one from everywhere it already landed is the slow part, and it’s the part that determines whether a rebrand actually completes. Old logos persist in partner sites, printed material, email signatures, and third-party directories long after the new one ships.Deleting the retired file outright seems tidy and creates a different problem: someone maintaining an old artifact needs to identify what they’re looking at, and nothing is worse for that than an asset that no longer exists anywhere. Archiving with a clear marker keeps the reference without keeping it in circulation.Tracking where an old version still appears turns retirement from an event into a task with an end. A list with owners can be worked through. An unwritten intention to clean it up eventually usually isn’t.
Last modified on August 12, 2026