Notes · 9 September 2020
On rapid pivots and small brands
Most small businesses going through a pivot do not need a redesign. They need a reduction.
Six months into the most chaotic year a lot of small businesses have ever had, a pattern is settling. Most small businesses going through a real pivot do not need a redesign. They need a reduction.
The instinct, when a business is changing, is to update everything. New website. New deck. New logo, sometimes. A new “brand voice” document. The thinking is that if the company is changing, the brand should reflect the change.
This is the wrong end. Most pivots are happening too fast for the brand to reliably reflect them. The market the company is selling into in October is not necessarily the market it is selling into in December. A redesign commissioned in October to reflect the October version of the company will be wrong by January. The right move, much of the time, is to reduce the brand back to its smallest viable expression and hold there.
What this looks like, in practice:
Pull the website back to a homepage and three to four key pages. Cut everything else. Most of the deep navigation on a small business website is doing very little work and is now actively unhelpful, because it points at parts of the company that may not exist next month.
Pull the type system back to two faces and two weights. Mid-pivot is not the time to be debugging four different display weights across five different page types.
Pull the colour palette back to a primary and one accent. The accent can move later if the company settles into a new market. Right now it should be quiet.
Hold there. Resist redesigning until the company has stopped pivoting.
The studios I trust on this kind of work do not necessarily produce the most exciting brand systems. They produce systems that survive the year. There is a difference and it is the difference clients will care about most, even if they cannot articulate it now.
A small recommendation: if you are working with a client through a pivot, send them Marty Neumeier’s Zag before the redesign conversation starts. It is short. It has more useful framing than most of what is being written about brands in the design press at the moment.
The companion pieces on redesigns versus rewrites and when the brief keeps changing cover the same territory from different angles. April Dunford’s Obviously Awesome is the most current treatment of positioning; Wally Olins’s On Brand is the older book that still holds up.