When the brand was wrong from the start

Some brand systems were never going to work.

I do not mean the ones that aged badly, or the ones that did not survive a pivot, or the ones that lost their distinctiveness because every other brand in the category copied them. Those are normal failure modes. I mean the ones that were wrong on day one, and that the original studio, the client, and most of the people in the room either did not see or chose not to mention.

The most common pattern: a brief that asked for “approachable, friendly, modern” and a system that delivered “loud, generic, exactly like every other startup”. The system was not technically wrong. It met the brief. The brief was the problem.

A few signs the brand was wrong from the start, written down so I notice them earlier on the next project.

The system has no quiet pieces. Everything is shouting. The wordmark is loud. The colours are loud. The illustrations are loud. The voice is loud. There is no quiet body type to set against the loud display, no muted secondary palette to set against the bright primary. The brand has only one volume.

The system relies entirely on a single distinctive piece. A wordmark, an illustration style, a colour. Pull that piece out and the rest is a generic Inter-and-blue startup kit. Brands that depend on a single load-bearing element are fragile. The element gets imitated, becomes a cliché, or no longer fits, and the brand collapses.

The system was designed for the pitch deck. Brands that look great in a sixteen-by-nine slide and worse everywhere else were designed to win the meeting where they were sold. Most brands are not used in sixteen-by-nine. They are used at email signature size, at favicon size, on packing slips, on receipts, in mobile inboxes. The pitch-deck brand fails at all of these.

The system has no rules for what it should not do. A good brand kit is at least half “do nots”. The brands that were wrong from the start tend to have a list of “dos” and an empty list opposite.

The hardest thing for studios that inherit one of these systems is to say so. Most studios fold and produce work that is consistent with the broken system. The few studios that say “the system is the problem, here is what we would do instead”, tend to keep the client longer and produce more durable work.

This is, I suspect, the single most useful piece of judgment a studio can develop. It is also the hardest to teach. I have not figured out how.

The two books that have most shaped how I think about this are Marty Neumeier’s Zag and Wally Olins’ On Brand. Both are thirty years past their first editions and most of the field is still catching up. The agency-side reading on inheriting broken systems, Michael Bierut’s How to Use Graphic Design to Sell Things, Explain Things, Make Things Look Better, has aged similarly well.