Wonderful constraints

Properly evangelizing your brand guidelines - and by extension the very existence and value of a formalized brand identity - is often an exercise in clearing up misconceptions.

Many people, even experienced designers who you’d might assume would know better, will flip through brand guidelines and think they are reading a document that purports to have all of the answers. This, in turn, can give it far too much power. It can be an excuse to put your brain in to overdrive (here is another set of corporate rules I have to get around) or to shut it off (no need to come up with any answers on my own, anymore).

All a set of brand guidelines really can be is a set of guardrails. Here is what we should always do. Here is what we should never do. Of course, there is a lot of daylight between those two things. Indeed, there’s enormous opportunity - a gift, even.

After all, how many examples do we need before we internalize the creative value of constraints - the idea that limitations are part of what brings out our best work.

I’ve become a collector of sorts of these kind of ideas over the years.

My absolute - heh! - favorite is Absolut Vodka’s advertising, which transformed the trajectory of the company and is one of the great all-time ad campaigns, at least in terms of staying power.

Here’s another one to consider: those funny highway signs.

The main reason they’re even available to deliver silly holiday messages is because the signs themselves are quite cumbersome to move, so even long after summer construction season is over, they tend to stay in high traffic and high visibility areas. Seeing that as an opportunity is creative all by itself. Aside from finding the space itself, though, there are the space constraints to consider as well as the especially broad audience. If it’s going to be funny it has to work for literally every American, and it has to be funny in a scant few characters.

That’s probably why, a few times a year, Departments of Transportation around the country act a bit like a late-night television show:

Bruning says his department meets four times a year to discuss new signage, and has a writer’s room of department employees to come up with new ones. “Sometimes I’ll bring a couple dozen ideas and 30% of them don’t fly. And sometimes you bring just a handful of them and they all go,” he says. Bruning’s department often leans on seasonal references (“Turkey says buckle buckle”) for inspiration, and will sometimes borrow from other traffic authorities across the country. “What’s a good idea in Colorado is probably a good idea in Ohio, too,” Bruning says. “I don’t remember which state it was, maybe Utah, that did camp in the mountains, not the left lane. And of course we were like, that’s brilliant!” While Ohio lacks mountain ranges, Bruning and his team adapted the joke for their own signage a few years ago. “We did camp in Ohio state parks, not the left lane.”

99 Percent Invisible has all sorts of examples scattered across its episodes. Another recent favorite covers the delicate art of title credits in movies and television, where aesthetics and arcane rules about who must be included and in what order collide.

You’ll hear the same kind of story over and over. Accepting what is an immovable object and working with it - finding sparks of joy within the lines - is where the magic often happens.

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. “With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall.”

His sentiment is, I think, often gravely misunderstood - wielded as a clever quip to justify crossing whatever line you want. It misses all the work being done by the word “foolish.”

Foolish consistency in the world of branding and marketing is simply missing the opportunity afforded by an unused road work sign or mistaking the silhouette of a bottle of Absolut Vodka for a bottle itself.