by putting our goals above another’s need to get by.
First, think like a brand designer
When designers approach brand, we are leveraging all our tools to try to create a visual voice: color, typography, and artifact cadence (like drop shadows) are only the beginning. We are also using the white space: how much breathing room we give around objects, how to use shape and color juxtaposition and space to tune their interaction. With typography, we will tweak the kerning and line to find the visual scan that better aligns with the voice we’re building. These are all subtle to a non-designer, but nonetheless effective — and a good brand designer knows how and where to modulate every tool in their arsenal to hone in on the visual voice that supports the brand. It’s system information, too, where a tiny tweak in one spot can throw the whole shebang off, requiring a cascade of tweaks to bring it back to balance.
It’s not simple. It’s not easy. It can have all the joy or pathos of a live orchestra helping to imbue the brand with another supporting thread of consistency and communication; and just like a live orchestra, one harsh note can founder the whole experience.
I get it, truly, that brand design and visual voice is a finely honed definition. Its power is undeniable when held with knowledge and confidence, and it should be a source of pride.
I get it, also, that from a business point of view, having a well-defined, balanced brand voice really does help to separate the business from the pack. It becomes a nugget of recognition and understanding, pulling from the experiencer’s memories the whiffs of all the interactions to date. Repetition, recognition, and building good will over time are the keys to loyalty and making sales.
Relensing the issue
Ever been so hungry that you reach for anything? Think about a diet you’ve been on and pushed too far. Think about an after-work workout you went to when you skipped lunch, so you could shoehorn everything into your schedule. Think about physical labor in the sun all day. Starvation isn’t a common thread in our society, but we still know hunger.
Now think about that hunger being thwarted by a chef insisting you not spoil your appetite: dinner will be glorious and it’s so close to perfection. You can smell it, and it smells really good, and you are so hungry, that you begin salivating. Just give me a breadstick, you might cajole. The chef, in the pride of their food, in the want to use your appetite to sharpen just how good their food is, laughs and tells you to wait, it’s only an hour away.
That’s likely to elicit an emotional response.
In putting brand voice above function, designers and business are the chef in this scenario. Those who have vacillating issues (like me) are the hangry, their sustenance thwarted. Those for whom sight issues are their continual cognitive load, it’s like keeping diabetics from eating when their blood sugar is low. It’s putting form above function.
The way we’ve ‘solved’ accessibility is actually rather futile.
We’re trying to design around the major permutations while still serving a unified brand voice. The rest…well, they are edge cases, right?
Like my passing experience with ocular migraine. Never heard of it before, and I’ve designed for accessibility. I’ve spent the time refining colors and font to AA and AAA contrast and sizing standards. I’ve had the luck to know someone (Jason Pamental) at the forefront of variable fonts, and in a manner where I was able to hear his ideas without a transaction curtailing information and speeding us to the end of our exchange.
He’s used the flexibility of variable fonts to improve accessible — with an award (I’m hoping more, so won’t list) — on the State of Rhode Island Division of Motor Vehicles site. In the settings, any user can change the color (limited to dark mode and system preferences) and scale the font size, line space, and word spacing.
A brand designer might play around with the word spacing and line height and cringe. They might even tell themselves never. on. my. design. To the average person, it might look clunky. To people with sight issues, these are a source of bliss.
If we, as designers, try to control the ingestion of our design for everyone, we are deliberately leaving out anyone who does not fit our unspoken requirements, even when we are trying to be inclusive of a larger set. It’s simply because the whole set can’t be served with one design. People are too different. Whenever we try to modulate for a broad set, we wind up hitting the wrong notes for everyone.
We try to work the maze by prioritizing, and as a culture we have bet heavily and consistently on one priority. We are defining the potential solutions as also and **more importantly **needing to meet our needs to serve a refined brand. The reasoning will be different depending on the person; it would be easy to paint it with a brush of profit, but I know too many designers for whom the design is passion and pride. A single answer simply will never be 100% correct. It doesn’t work for accessible design, and it doesn’t work for analyzing the behaviors that got us to the point of thinking accessibility can be solved with one design.
Designing branded versions for every accessibility potential out there is…a large endeavor. The only way to really balance all the competing possibility of every visual issue is to approach it with a multiplicity of systems — like light mode and dark mode, but geared towards vision issues that don’t antagonize each other. That approach would be massive efforts; not only on the part of researchers, designers, and developers, but on the users’ part, too. Users would have to make an effort to select with every interaction point; one of the solutions is to curtail where they went. It’s a choice, technically, but one imposed on them; the choice between distress and function is not a real choice.
By giving users one place to input their personal fuzzy visual math and allowing it to be imposed on the brands, we would actually be putting the function of real people first.
The way I see this working would be an extension on browsers, OS function, or a software (think along the lines of virus protection — global access with a refined input point), and code added to the site headers allowing for the modification of design variables. Sites already transitioned to design systems would be the most capable of managing this in the short term.
There would be tradeoffs
Positives
- Designing refined, branded experiences for sightedness variabilities could be something that could be added to with design system maturity
- Serve potentially the full array of the ‘edge case’ that our IT tends to leave behind; I’m sure we still have things to learn
- Avoid legal expenses
Negatives
- Visual brand voice consistency diminishes between digital and physicalized marketing assets
- Immature design systems’ visual brand voice might disappear digitally for those using the tool, leaving content, product, and long-term behavior/reputation to shoulder the need for differentiation
- It would be another point of technology that would need to be included, tested, managed, and be a potential point of failure
- It would affect load time and power consumption, so a more nuanced and thoughtful approach to all the loaded tools would be that much more important.
Taken in terms of quantity, that’s not a balanced tradeoff: no brainer, don’t do it.
Look at it, instead, as a tool to build towards an inclusive society. We have a tendency to tighten down too far in our assessment of ‘norm’, and create cockpits that fit zero pilots. It’s just a matter of time before someone finds a statistical ‘norm’ that doesn’t include your particular oddball trait, or doesn’t update the data set over time. We aren’t machined. We’re grown; and we evolve, and environment affects our everything in ways we can’t anticipate.
The intent is not to remove brand voice entirely. This isn’t an all or nothing possibility. Visual brand will still work for the central mass, just as it has been. It’s taking a back seat when the individual needs it, and even then design systems can be made that would allow the brand to approach solving for ever smaller categories of visual challenges. This would remove a barrier for inclusivity, and remove a barrier for new, small, evolving, and building businesses.