Tag Archives: branding

Working With Style Guides

We work with clients big and small, so we run the gamut when it comes to design constraints. Sometimes, the client wants to start from scratch and gives us just a few parameters, while other times, we’re just making some minor changes to an already-established brand.

Somewhere in the middle is where we often find ourselves dealing with a style guide. This is a document from the client that outlines (in varying levels of detail) how their brand is represented across all media. Often, it has things like when and where to use the corporate logo(s), official colors, fonts, and that sort of thing.

We are used to working within these bounds, so that’s not a problem. But sometimes, the style guide can go just a little too far.

For instance, we worked with a client at one point whose guide specified the minimum size of the logo for display on the web at around 500 x 300 pixels, and that it had to remain on screen at all times. Think about this in a mobile perspective — that would take up most of a phone screen, and if it has to be onscreen always, then the content is doled out in 5-word increments!

It was clear in that example that the company hadn’t thought very clearly about the different devices and media that might be in play. Conversely, the reverse can happen as well — where the style guide is so vague that you’re not sure if you’re following the rules until you discover later that you’ve broken them.

Sometimes, we find ourselves in the position of creating these guides for clients, and while that can be tricky, it’s a useful reminder of the challenges involved.

What we’ve found is that even when a style guide is clear, it’s no substitute for good and open communication with the client. Sometimes what’s written isn’t what’s in practice, and it’s always good to get the straight skinny.

Should Lorem Ipsum Die?

Last month, Paul Souders posted a piece that was one-part futurism, one-part opinion, one-part rant, entitled: “Content-first design ain’t herding cats.” He raises a handful of design trends and then makes leaps to what he perceives to be the best responses.

Amidst some of the all-caps and bolded pieces is the underlying premise that content should always drive design, and thus, the content should be present before the design is done. Not necessarily a revolutionary sentiment, but certainly an admirable one — sort of the web design version of form following function.

In practice, though, it seems like it’s a goal but not often the reality. Usually, content is getting reworked (or generated) as the design is being done as well. So Souders’ contention that we should “[k]ill Lorem Ipsum for good” might ignore how projects tend to work. Or at least how they’ve tended to work in our experience.

That’s not to say design drives content — quite the opposite. But often, a design framework will be in place well before the content is “done” (put in quotes because when is content ever really done?). When the content is ready to go into production, there are often tweaks and alterations to the design. But to hold one up altogether for the other would extend project lifespans considerably.

Other responses are predicated on the idea that walled gardens and Instapaper will be the primary way we view content in the future — web scrapers that take someone else’s content and puts it in their display. I’m not so sure about that future, both for copyright and commercial reasons. Big brands aren’t going to want some third-party app effectively removing their specific brand pieces (trade dress), nor will they stand for it for long, if it threatens to become ubiquitous.

Further, it’s difficult to see how the Instapapers of the world would handle more intrinsically dynamic content, where design necessarily is a bit removed from content because the content can vary.

Thinking hard about content before thinking hard about design is a good idea. A great idea, even. Holding up the design process until the dots and twiddles are done to accommodate a scaper-driven future? I’m not convinced.

Advertising Saturation

I was at a restaurant the other night, and needed to use the restroom. As I was doing so, I could not help but notice that there was an ad in the restroom (for neither the restaurant nor its restroom services). That was a little offputting by itself, but moreso was it’s location: the bottom of the urinal.

Upon further checking (advertising research, not checking bathrooms), it appears this is quite the growth location for advertising — some entrepreneur has even come up with “interactive” urinal advertising. My, oh my.

It got me thinking (no pun intended) about advertising saturation. There has, for many years, been an evolving science of determining when one’s ads have reached as many people as they’re going to. This is the point, it’s theorized, that you can stop spending money on that campaign — to do more reaps diminishing returns.

But what about the saturation to the viewer? It is increasingly difficult to go through a day (let alone a few hours) without seeing ads. Surely this overload of messaging dilutes its effectiveness.

This comes up with our clients regularly. When working on commercial sites that wish to advertise their own wares, or publishing platforms that feature the advertising of sponsors, there are always conversations about placement, frequency, and the balance of content vs. ads. The initial tendency is often to create as many ad placement opportunities as possible — to really “get the message out.”

In our usability and interface testing, though, we find that there is a balance point, after which additional branding and marketing messages simply aren’t seen, and by that time, the effectiveness of the ones that are seen is also diminished. While we haven’t studied the results of our testing over the years, my guess is that the balance point has shifted over the years, as viewers get both more sophisticated and more tired of seeing wall-to-wall selling.

It’s a reinforcement for doing user testing, to be sure. But it’s also an incentive to look at more integrative ways to communicate advertising — and more restrained ways of papering it across the Internet!