Design as brand storyteller: Three ways design drives brand stories
Design does more than look good. In the right hands, it can tell the story of the brand like no linear narrative can.
“Storytelling” is one of those words. In marketing circles, it gets hauled out whenever someone wants to make what they’re doing sound more like art than business.
“She’s not a copywriter, she’s a brand storyteller.”
“What this ad really needs is some good storytelling.”
Or, in the worst case: “Hi, I’m Brad. I’m a brand storydoer!”
But there’s a reason why this word is used when marketers or creatives want to elevate what they’re talking about: the word storytelling has power.
We know what it means, and we know how it feels when we get lost in a really good story. We know that good storytellers not only make their point, they drive it home in a way that makes it stick with us.
That’s why I find it interesting that so few marketers grasp the power that great design has in telling brand stories. Most marketing operations reserve storytelling for their advertising activities, where stories are told in a linear fashion in TV ads. Maybe this is why so many ad creatives call their commercials “films.”
It doesn’t help that we operate in an age where atomic design, component-driven design, and other turnkey scale design solutions—many of which are becoming more and more common—are needed to deal with the sheer volume of digital communications a brand requires. It is easy to lose sight of both how powerful good design can be in dimensionalizing a brand (or message) and how rich the design toolkit is in doing so when speed and efficiency is so vital.
In reality, however, good design is the foundation of every brand’s story; the identity, the user experience of the web site, the way complex information about products is organized and provided, and yes, even the art direction of the brand’s videos all form the foundation of what the brand wants to be and how it wants people to feel about it.
This is such a rich area that my colleagues and I have launched a whole series of roundtable discussions on the theme, looking at different aspects of how brands enrich their stories through design.
How is it done? Well, design is a broad discipline, with lots of different crafts and skills used in concert to get results. Designers study and practice for years to get good at making their work speak beyond the words on the page, and they use all of those skills to do it. There’s no silver bullet or how-to.
But we can study good examples of how design tells brand stories better than words — or even in some cases linear video or narratives — could. And these are just a few examples. In reality, I’m not sure there’s a limit to how many ways design can contribute to storytelling. But here’s a start.
1. Extensible Identities
Brand Identity Systems are both misunderstood and under-appreciated. Many people equate brand identity with a logo, maybe a font choice and a color (though those both usually come from the logo).
Really, an identity system is much more, and clarifies not only how a brand communicates, but why it communicates that way. A well-designed identity system gives those communicating on behalf of a brand a robust and flexible visual language that instantly makes the communication part of the brand’s repertoire while also infusing the communication with the equity already in the brand. It can include everything from the primary logo mark to graphic visual elements and assets, from typefaces to language standards, from stationery and composition guidance to video style. And most importantly, it defines what the brand is about and how to communicate that visually. In other words, the brand story.
The really strong ones are actually a framework for themselves: a way of extending the visual language to almost any product or situation that may pop up in the future. These can be very powerful, particularly in storytelling. By allowing the designer to customize or adapt core identity elements — even something so sacred as the logo itself — in predefined ways, an identity can say important things about the brand. This framework is a powerful tool in communicating a story that might not yet be conceived.
Here’s an example. Baskin Robbins recently redesigned its identity with the help of branding agency Jones Knowles Ritchie. At first glance, I thought it was one of those highly practical projects limited to operational needs: something like the logo rendered poorly on a mobile device or the trademark color varied too much from signage to print to screens and needed to be tweaked.
But then I saw an excellent deep dive on the work, by the folks at Brand New. Yes, the logo had been nudged. But it seems its purpose was to allow the mark room for new variations on itself to represent the flavors Baskin Robbins was famous for — all 31 of them, one at a time. The 31 embedded in the BR is drawn as strawberry, mint chip, cookies and cream, you name it. All delicious, all fun.
In actuality, BR has more than 31 flavors (there are 42 on their website at the time this was written). And really, many ice cream brands boast as many if not more flavors. But the brand has done a great job of owning the number 31 — which of course seems like more than enough when you only really eat one or two flavors per visit — and has now created a way for the design of the logo itself to tell that variety and serendipity story.
The rest of the design system is quite rich and got some strong updates, as well. The brand typeface has been changed with a custom-drawn font that captures the heritage while somehow also modernizing and simplifying the brand, and also remaining lighthearted.
Overall, the brand story of variety is not only more ownable in this update, but it is literally and figuratively central to the brand. Spend some time with the Brand New article — they do a great job looking at and critiquing the system.
2. Digital Experiences
Digital media — websites, apps, games, etc. — offer something no other kind of communication medium does. Interactive experiences. Sure, museums, retail/merchandizing and installations allow a certain level of interactivity, but not at scale, and not with the level of sophistication that technology provides. This interactivity enables nonlinear storytelling that traditional formats can’t. And with AI, AR, VR, and smart home devices becoming mainstream, this power of this interactivity is only compounding.
Nonetheless, many marketers still use digital media as a kind of desktop publishing (there’s an ‘80’s-era term I’m sure you haven’t heard in a while). Much of web content is approached both conceptually and executionally as a way to convey brochureware to varied audiences. In turn, much of the design feels like a print design process, and much of the innovation in this area is making content management systems that make this easier and less reliant on technical skills. Still more clients rely on creating PDFs and posting those as this lofty tech-free publishing goal seems fleeting.
But of course, this kind of digital communication isn’t as interactive, and it limits a brand’s ability to tell non-linear stories.
There are lots of reasons why this keeps happening, and they’re not (all) the marketer’s fault. Cost, sure. Practicality, yes. Asset availability, yup. User behavior, uh-huh. Search engine behavior, oh mais oui. I could go on and on and probably could (and should) write another whole article on this topic.
Nonetheless, what is clear is that smart, user-centered interaction design can tell a brand story in a way unimagined by the audience, and land it a whole lot better. It’s clear because when it happens, it’s magic.
Here’s an example of this from my company’s portfolio. It’s called “Driven by Data,” and it is the case study for Dell Technologies’s partnership with McLaren Racing. B2B tech case studies are notoriously dry. They suffer from an identity crisis: are they a spec sheet, a marketing asset, a persuasive tool, a leave behind, or all of the above? They are also an accountability hot potato — are they marketing’s responsibility? Or the product group’s? Or Sales? And how are they delivered? Who pays? Obviously there are hurdles.
But Dell Technologies got it right with this case. Instead of going with a tried and true PDF case, they rallied forces to produce something different. Working with the design team, the client focused on storytelling instead of listing bullets, and put the user in the drivers’ seat (pun intended).
Dell Technologies’ relationship with McLaren is a very tight one. The data collected and analyzed in a typical race is mind-blowing, and Dell’s sensors, equipment, services and capabilities are embedded in the equipment and are powering every step of the race cycle. The design uses a typical race — depicted through real footage — as the interaction model, inviting the user to switch between cameras and sensors on the race car and telling this deep integration story.
The experience uses a graphic style that fits the brand language but also uses video game cues to make the information come alive and inspire interaction. The story the design tells heightens the excitement the same way a movie or book would, making the user feel what Dell Technologies is enabling, rather than think about it.
Not every case study is about something so exciting as racing, and not every project has the assets to make such an experience possible. But in this case, design told a story of tight partnership, technological prowess and inspiring abilities. And race cars! But it did it without bullets, making the brand stand out from other tech providers.
3. Typography
Typography feels like it is becoming a lost art, though it isn’t.
While the painstaking craft of refining letterforms to express both character and meaning continues to be a foundation of graphic design, it seems that type selections and executions are increasingly driven by digital platforms (like Google), availability, compatibility, and licensing. The origin story for Arial and its conquest of Helvetica is an early but significant example of how tech giants constrained good typography.
Nonetheless, typography can infuse tone and emotion into a design like almost no other design device, except perhaps color. Type can set the mood and tone of a brand story in the instant a person sees the design, with staid, formal serif fonts conveying one feeling and loose, flowing brush scripts conveying a different one.
Much has been written on this topic by typography masters far more qualified than I. Panos Vassiliou, type designer and head of creative and founder of Parachute Typefoundry, wrote on how typography is central to evoking the right emotion for brands in a recent piece for D&AD. He says, “The quest for growth in the modern world has forced brands to get involved in a constant race to penetrate new markets, outrun competitive brands and differentiate by investing in corporate branding and corporate typefaces. It is well documented that most successful brands build emotional relationships with their customers as the best way to engage and motivate them to take action. Typography can effectively take control of this task, maximise brand awareness and achieve a balance between the verbal and visual language of the brand.”
Vassiliou references another great example in his article: a movement of luxury brands towards clean, sans-serif fonts that reflect the modern, stark feel of high-end goods right now. It’s captured in this meme. These redesigns certainly tell stories of evolution, modernization and movement away from decorative tradition. Whether they tell a differentiated, ownable story is a different question altogether, and is, I suspect, the point of this meme. It’s clear, though, in absence of any pictorials, the typography plays a central role in those stories.
But don’t take Vassiliou’s (or my) word for it. Designer Emanuele Abrate breaks it down for you in his project Logofonts, in which he replaces the brand name in famous logos with the name of the font it is set in (or at least the font that was the inspiration for it). Journalist Jack Shepherd discusses the project with Abrate in an interesting article for UX Collective. Here are a few examples.
The cognitive dissonance here is amusing, but also very telling. The typography in these marks are central to the character and mood of the design.
And so, typography is as central to brand storytelling as something like setting in a novel, with some fonts having us imagine that “It was a dark and stormy night,” and others inferring “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” While a font choice alone may not be able to tell the brand story by itself, you can’t tell the brand story accurately without well-considered typographical decisions.
And, so…
Brand storytelling has lots of tools, tricks, methods and practitioners. Any practitioner will tell you their specialty is the best, and of course I’m not an unbiased voice in this argument. But many marketers and brand managers are missing opportunities to use the design talent and tools at their disposal (some which they may already be paying for) to tell richer, more evocative brand stories. Brands that do it well stand out and get rewarded in outsized equity.
To learn how design leaders at some top companies are telling brand stories through design, join me for my company’s free upcoming event on the topic, here.
