How branding SHOULD work versus how branding does work

When it comes to 'personal brand' there's a lot of fuss in library-land, but the subject of corporate branding is, I hope, relatively uncontroversial. Most companies, organisations, and businesses, whether they're non-profit or profit-chasing, have some kind of branding - a visual style which makes them easily identifiable. We may not want to be corporate, but we do want to be easily recognisable; that's an important part of effective communication.

But often in Libraries I see branding that isn't doing the job branding is supposed to do. What is branding, what's it FOR, really? Well one thing we can be sure it's NOT for is making everything you do look exactly the same. If everything looks the same it just becomes so much white noise.

I read an analogy on the Canva blog which I really liked: "Think of your slides as sisters, not identical twins." They're talking about creating presentations, but really this applies to all branding - it's helpful to think of the visual resources you produce (signage, leaflets, guides, social media presences, the website, merchandise, digital displays, PowerPoints and so on) as being part of the same family, rather than part of a sinister cloning programme... However I'm going to take that analogy and adapt it to be about architectural relationships rather than familial ones.

 contine reading on ned-potter.com

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