Good Design Is Mostly Less Explaining

Good identity design does more than look right. It reduces repeated decisions, creates consistency and helps organisations build recognition and trust.

A surprising amount of working life is spent explaining things that should already be obvious.

Which logo is the right one?

What colour are we using?

Where’s the PowerPoint template?

Why does the brochure look different from the website?

Who gave Dave access to Comic Sans?

None of these are enormous problems on their own. Together they become death by a thousand tiny decisions.

That’s one of the less glamorous jobs of good identity design. It removes decisions.

A useful visual identity gives people enough structure to get on with their day. Logo, type, colour, layout and a few sensible rules. Not a 240-page brand manual requiring a small civil service to administer it.

And consistency does something else.

It builds recognition.

When an organisation repeatedly looks and behaves like itself, people don’t have to work so hard to understand what they’re looking at. Familiarity arrives. Familiarity becomes confidence. Confidence becomes trust.

None of this requires everything to look identical. That’s not consistency. That’s North Korea with a brand manual.

The system just needs enough backbone that different things still clearly belong to the same organisation.

Good design rarely saves the world.

It can, however, save you from answering the same bloody question every Tuesday morning.

That’ll do.