Approach

Before drawing anything I try to see the thing in use. For Ventori that meant looking at where routers end up in Indian homes: behind the television, or wherever the cable happens to reach. The brief asked for an identity. The research showed that the product itself was what people saw every day, so the brand work started from the object.

A brand system is mostly used by people who were never in the room when it was made: a printer, a new hire in their second week, a volunteer putting up signs on the morning of an event. I write guidelines for them. That usually means fewer rules, stated plainly, with the reason printed next to each one, because a rule without a reason gets broken the first time it is inconvenient.

I spent a year leading treks for Indiahikes. A briefing on a mountain has to work for someone who is cold and tired, and it can’t depend on me standing next to them. I use the same test at a desk: a sign read from a moving auto-rickshaw, a label from a cheap print run, a phone screen in direct sun. The version worth keeping is usually the one that survives all of them.

At Balgokulam I worked as a design researcher and curriculum designer. The main thing I took from it is that the first version put in front of people mostly tells you which of your assumptions were wrong. I now plan projects with room for a second and third round, and try to get something rough in front of the people who will use it while it is still cheap to change.

The Armatrix guidelines open with a note on how to read them, before a single page about the mark: every part of the system should know what it is, what it does and where it fits. I find it more useful to agree on a sentence like that with a client than on any logo route, because every later decision can be checked against it.

I tend to over-build. Some of my earlier systems had more rules than anyone could remember, and the teams using them quietly ignored most of them. These days I cut a guideline down until something breaks, then put back only what broke.