It's been many months since my last branding post back in June, so I figured I ought to renew my efforts to get this 10 part series published. I left off with best practice number 6, which I will now reveal is "Use SharePoint Solution Packages to enforce consistency across all the web front ends in the farm".
Now, I'm not going to beat the horse dead on this point because this is a highly documented feature within SharePoint, both the why and the how-to. But I will say that Solutions MUST be in a top 10 branding best practice list!
In an average SharePoint engagement where I'm doing some UI customizations, I'd say I end up deploying around 50+ files into the 12 hive. Without solution packages, you're forced to manually copy/paste those files which opens yourself up to mistakes and inconsistencies. Understanding how to use solutions is a MUST for any SharePoint developer.
Phil