Check out Tony's Chocoloney’s brand guide

For the sake of my wallet and waistband, I tried to stay away from trendy, nine-dollar chocolate bars for a long time. And while it was nearly impossible to avoid the now-defunct Mast Bros in the 2010s – the packaging was beautiful and the flavors sounded fancy (Olive Oil Chocolate?) – I mostly succeeded.

But I really dig Tony’s Chocolonely.

They’re doing great work fighting exploitation in the cocoa industry and pledge to make all their products “100% slave free.” And their product is bomb – check out the dark almond sea salt one if you spot it.

Beyond all that, the cool thing about Tony’s Chocolonely for marketing and design nerds is their logo. Their logo isn’t a logo; it’s the chocolate bar itself.

Last year, Arjen Klinkenberg, the brand’s creative director, posted this quasi-brand guide on LinkedIn:

They don’t use the words on their wrapper. They use the wrapper itself as their primary mark. Here’s what Klinkenberg says is the reason:

When people see our logo, we want them to realise we are not just a brand, but a physical thing. A seemingly simple chocolate bar. Our iconic, red bar that started it all. Different to any other at the time – changing the industry from within, 1 bar at a time.

We want them to feel it in their hands – the weight, the crumpling of the paper wrapper, the anticipation of unwrapping and sinking their teeth into the chunky chocolate within. And help them remember: by picking up this bar instead of another, you create change.

I love it. There are all these standard-issue rules of logo design: make it a vector image, have it work in one-color applications, make sure it reads well on small sizes, have a stacked and a wide version, yada yada. And this design choice breaks more or less all of them. But it still works!

Though it probably won’t work for you. The rules are generally pretty good, and we usually followed for a reason! But there are probably some other rules that you can break with your brand that would help you stand apart. Maybe you can package your product in a funky way. Or make your website monochromatic. Break just enough rules to be noticeable.

(BTW, even Tony’s isn’t 100% adherent to its own rule – Klinkenberg himself has the wordmark on his shirt in his LinkedIn profile photo!)