DESIGN SYSTEMS, BRAND GOVERNANCE, DOCUMENTATION

S-W COLOR CONFIDENCE
PLATFORM GUIDELINES

Guidelines for Sherwin-Williams Color Confidence Campaign.

PROBLEM:

Color Confidence was a campaign that had to work everywhere Sherwin-Williams meets a customer — in-store, digital, print, and partner channels — and be executed by teams and agencies who would never sit in the same room. Without a shared standard, that kind of distributed execution drifts fast: typography loosens, color gets applied inconsistently, layouts stop feeling related. The deeper challenge was that the campaign is about giving customers confidence in color selection. A brand that appears inconsistent in how it uses color undercuts the exact promise it's making.

APPROACH:

I developed the campaign's brand guidelines and toolkit — a 39-page system defining the visual language and the strategic framework for applying it. The design problem wasn't writing rules; it was calibrating them. Too loose and consistency collapses. Too rigid and teams can't adapt to the channels and edge cases I'd never see. I built it to be prescriptive where consistency was non-negotiable — typography, color application, layout logic — and deliberately flexible where local judgment mattered. Because it functions as a self-service reference rather than a document I'd walk anyone through, it had to answer questions in the order a designer actually asks them.

OUTCOME:

The toolkit became the working standard for Color Confidence execution, letting internal teams and outside partners produce on-brand work independently, without routing every decision back through a central reviewer. It turned brand consistency from something enforced through review cycles into something built into how people worked.

AGENCY:    McKinney

CLIENT:      Sherwin-Williams

CDs:          Alex Shulhafer, Kathryn Moffitt