A brand is handed to strangers
In the months after we handed over the website of ai-coustics, the company's own team published to its blog almost every week and added pages for new models, all in the typeface and colours of the identity. The company has run the site itself ever since.
A brand is handed to strangers.
The people who decide what a brand is are a handful of founders and designers working over a few months. The people who use it are everyone else, for years: a new marketing hire, a developer, a freelancer on a deadline, a sales lead building a deck at night. None of them were present when the decisions were made, and few will read the book that records them.
A book asks each of them to read, understand and then judge as the first group would have judged. A component, a colour style or a template asks for nothing of the kind. The decision is already inside the thing a person picks up, so the right result is also the easiest one.
That is why we build a brand into the files a company works in. The identity for ai-coustics came with a design library and interface tokens, and when the company wanted the next version of its website a year later, the work began with that system and extended it.
A system has a limit. It holds only the decisions that have already been made, and when a company enters a new market or its category shifts, a person with judgement still has to notice that the templates no longer fit.
From inside a company it tends to look different. A deck goes out, or a job advert, or a product page, and the brand that was presented a year before is hard to find in it. It happens to careful teams, because they were given a book and a deadline.
A brand is ready when a stranger gets it right on a deadline.
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