The case for fewer materials

Most of the brand systems I am asked to fix have the same problem. Too many fonts. Too many accent colours. A grid that turned into a suggestion three contractors ago. None of the additions were unreasonable in isolation. The problem is that nobody added them together.

A brand made of three things, repeated consistently across two hundred different pieces of work, will read more strongly than a brand made of fifteen things scattered across the same two hundred pieces. The repetition is doing the work. New variants undo it.

In my own practice the rule is roughly: one type family with two clear weights, three colours with two of them carrying most of the load, one spacing system, one grid. Anything more than that needs an argument. Anything less is probably one short on the variants.

The Vignelli Canon, which Lars Müller publishes for free as a PDF, works through the same idea harder than I will. Vignelli took the discipline to a fault: he was famously down to half a dozen typefaces for an entire career. The lesson is not the specific list. The lesson is that every new material added to a system has to earn its keep against everything already in there, including the work the system has been used for so far.

Pentagram’s archive is another good place to look at how this plays out at scale. Their brand systems tend to be unembellished. Two faces. A wordmark. A colour. A behaviour. The interesting work is then about applying those few pieces with care across a hundred different jobs, rather than designing a hundred different jobs.

Three signs your system has gathered too many materials, in rough order of severity:

1. There are several “versions” of the logo in production, used in different contexts, and the differences are not principled.
2. Marketing pages have started using a typeface that nobody can remember adopting.
3. The accent colours fall along a spectrum rather than a small set of distinct hues. (This is the one I see most often, and the one designers are most reluctant to fix, because their hex pickers gave them all that range and it feels wasteful not to use it.)

If you find yourself in any of those, the cure is not a bigger system. It is a smaller one. Pull everything back to what you can defend in one sentence per material. Apply that ruthlessly until the next piece of work demands an addition. Most of the time it will not.

Two more references in this neighbourhood: Bibliothèque’s brand systems work, which is consistently the cleanest small-set discipline I see year on year, and Stockholm Design Lab’s case studies for systems that have been extended over decades without losing coherence. The companion piece on matching things covers the underlying argument from a slightly different angle.