Crafting a Brand That Stands Out

Distinctiveness is not the same as difference. A brand can be entirely different from its competitors and still be forgotten, because nothing about it is easy to recall or repeat.

What gets remembered is a small number of assets used with unreasonable consistency, and a point of view that survives being summarised by somebody who does not work there.

Own fewer things, harder

Most identity systems are too rich. Three colours, two typefaces, four illustration styles and a photographic direction give a team enough choices to never look like itself twice.

Pick the two or three assets that could carry recognition on their own — a colour, a shape, a way of cropping — and spend the discipline there. Everything else can be flexible.

Make the system usable by people who are not designers

An identity is applied far more often by a sales team building a deck at midnight than by the studio that made it. If it only works in expert hands, it will not work.

The measure of a good system is how good the average application looks, not the best one.

Write the voice down as rules, not adjectives

"Confident, friendly, human" describes every brand guideline ever written and helps nobody. Rules do: what the company never says, how it refers to its own customers, whether it uses exclamation marks, what it does with bad news.

Ten specific rules will change more copy than four pages of adjectives.

Give it time to become boring internally

Recognition is built by repetition, and repetition feels like stagnation from the inside long before it registers from the outside.

The brands that compound are the ones that resisted the refresh for another two years. That is the whole trick, and it is mostly a matter of nerve.