On matching things

The word matching keeps getting mis-heard in client conversations.

When a client says they want their website to “match” their brand, they usually mean one of two things, and almost never both. They either mean the website should look identical to the existing brochure, business card, or pitch deck (so far so reasonable), or they mean the website should feel like the same company that produced those things (much better, much harder).

The first version of matching is a cheap kind. Use the same colours. Use the same fonts. Stamp the wordmark in the corner. Done.

The second version is brand systems work, and it is harder because it asks questions about what the brand is for, not just what it looks like. A brochure is a slow object. A reader picks it up, holds it for thirty seconds, and decides whether to keep reading. A homepage is fast. A reader arrives, makes a judgement in two seconds, and either continues or leaves. Asking the homepage to look identical to the brochure is asking the homepage to do its job badly, in service of a brochure that is not in the room.

What you actually want, almost always, is for the homepage to feel like the brochure was made by the same studio. Same materials, used differently. The colours are there but used at different ratios. The typeface is there but at different sizes and weights. The voice is the same but in shorter sentences, because nobody reads long ones at speed.

This is what is meant here by matching. Not identical. Coordinated. Like a wardrobe. Two people from the same household will tend to dress differently from each other but both look like they got their clothes from broadly the same kind of place. That is what a brand should do.

Brand systems that get this right, as references: Pentagram’s identity work for medium-sized cultural institutions, Bibliothèque for editorial-led brand systems, Stockholm Design Lab for systems that scale across large product ranges. All three treat the brochure and the website (and the packaging slip and the email signature) as a single coordinated piece, made of the same materials, used differently.

This distinction is the single most important one to get right in early-stage client conversations, and the one most often missed in the brief.