Log in
Why print-first brand systems break online, and how to push back without demanding a full rebrand.
I've been grumbling about this one for years, because although almost everyone now meets a brand through a screen, we're still handed identities designed for brochures, business cards, and the occasional exhibition stand, and then told to make the website behave itself. So this month I have a proper rant about it and Marcus does his best to talk me down, which he largely manages. We also get into top task analysis, which is one of my favorite research techniques, and the free app I've built because I got fed up running it the hard way.
App of the Week
Top Task Analysis is a free app I've built to make top task analysis considerably less painful, mainly because I'd spent years running it with a spreadsheet, a survey tool, and a fair amount of swearing.
How top task analysis works
Top task analysis is a technique Gerry McGovern came up with, and it works a bit like a survey except that it stops people from being greedy, because an ordinary survey hands you a long list of everything your users say they'd quite like and no sense whatsoever of what they'd actually walk over hot coals for. This forces them to prioritize, so you end up knowing which small handful of things the majority genuinely care about. Gerry's classic example is the Microsoft Office knowledge base that kept answering more and more questions and kept watching its satisfaction score slide, because the answers people actually needed were buried under a hundred they didn't.
I use it for all sorts, from shaping information architecture and working out which objections are worth answering, through to prioritizing features and deciding what has earned its place on a dashboard. Roughly 80% of your users want about 20% of what's on your site, and this is how you find the 20%.
What the app does
The reason nobody runs it as often as they should is that it needs at least 2 rounds, one to gather the tasks and another to vote on them, so the app handles both in a single pass. You seed it with a starter list from AI, from the client, or from whichever stakeholder shouts loudest, and it genuinely doesn't matter if that list is a bit rubbish, because visitors can search it, pick the 5 tasks that matter most to them, and add anything that's missing, which then appears for everyone who arrives after them. A second screen asks them to put their 5 in order, and the back end lets you see the lot, merge the 14 different ways people phrase the same task, and tidy up anything unhelpful. And yes, there's a profanity filter, because I have met the internet before.
Marcus made the good point that you want a segmentation question alongside it so you can see top tasks broken down by audience, which is already in there, and he also dug up a hospital trust site we worked on years back where we dropped the top 8 tasks straight under the main navigation. They're still sitting there 8 years later, which either says something flattering about the technique or something less flattering about how often that site gets touched.
Give it a go
It's free, because I did think about charging for it and then couldn't be arsed, which is not the sharpest business decision I've ever made. Have a play and tell me what's broken.
- The app: Top Task Analysis
- The step-by-step guide: Top Task Analysis: A Free App And Step-by-Step Guide
- Feedback: paul@boagworld.com
When brand guidelines fight the web
Most people meet a brand through a screen these days, and yet the web is still treated as the place where you paste in whatever was designed for print. A branding agency mocks up a homepage that has never met a real sentence, the guidelines get signed off after 18 months and roughly all of somebody's political capital, and then some poor soul is handed the job of protecting it, at which point they'll defend an unreadable contrast ratio to the death because it's sitting on page 47 of the PDF. Consistency matters and I'm not arguing otherwise, but being consistently difficult to read isn't much of an achievement.
Marcus agreed with the general complaint and pointed out that Headscape has described itself as a brand interpreter for digital for something like 15 years now, for exactly this reason. He also told the story of a charity working with deafblind people whose shiny new sub-brand logo failed color contrast checks, and if I'd invented that example nobody would have believed me.
A brand should serve the organization and its audience, so the moment its rules make the website harder to use, those rules need to change.
What a brand actually is
A lot of the confusion comes from shrinking brand down to a logo, some colors, a typeface, and a photography style, when all of that is really just the clothes the organization turns up in. The brand itself is closer to a personality, made up of what the organization believes, how it talks, and how it treats people when nobody important is watching, and your copy and your customer service will say far more about that personality than a logo ever manages. Which means we have considerably more room to move online than the brand police like to let on.
Why print-first branding breaks online
Print gives a designer a beautifully controlled environment and the web gives them almost none of it, which is where most of the trouble starts. Somebody working on a poster knows the exact dimensions, the exact paper, and the exact ink, whereas online you're designing for a canvas you can't see, on screens that run from a cracked phone in bright sunlight to a 32 inch monitor with the brightness turned up to painful, at whatever zoom level somebody's eyesight demands that day. Pantone certainty becomes display roulette, where pale colors wash out, dark colors go muddy, and the elegant light gray text you signed off on a calibrated screen simply vanishes on a cheap laptop in a train carriage.
A poster sits still and a website refuses to
Then there's the small matter that a poster sits still and a website refuses to. Websites need hover states, focus indicators, error messages, forms, navigation that collapses gracefully, and buttons that look like buttons, and most traditional guidelines have nothing at all to say about any of it, because it never occurred to anyone in the room that it might come up. Add a few thousand combinations of real content, German translations that run half as long again, and pages that grow arms and legs over 3 years, and the handful of polished examples in the brand book stops being much use to anybody.
The familiar symptoms
The same problems keep turning up, and once you've noticed them you can't stop seeing them. There are the walls of capital letters that slow reading to a crawl, the brand color pairings with contrast so poor you can fail them by squinting, the decorative typefaces that turn to mush at small sizes, and the logos that only really work when they're the size of a bus, although responsive logos that simplify as they shrink are a lovely solution whenever anyone can be bothered to make one.
The typographic hierarchy problem
The one that genuinely baffles me, and I've run into it twice in recent months, is a brand book from an actual branding agency with no meaningful typographic hierarchy in it at all, as though headings were a passing fad we'd all agreed to ignore. Then come the layouts that can't cope with content nobody wrote in advance, the complete silence on containers and components, and the fact that there's frequently no contrasting color available for a call to action, because heaven forbid anybody should click on anything.
Where the cost lands
Any one of those on its own looks like a small compromise you can live with, but stack them up and the brand starts shoving people away from the website it was supposed to make them love. The cost lands on accessibility, on comprehension, on conversion, on trust, and eventually on the confidence of the designers themselves, who stop challenging the daft rules and start ignoring them when nobody's looking, which is how you end up with 9 versions of the brand in the wild and not one of them right.
What the attention test showed
I recently tested a brand-compliant homepage against a more flexible treatment using an AI attention prediction tool. The looser version came back with roughly 20% higher predicted clarity and focus, and predicted attention on the main call to action went up by more than 80%. These are modeled predictions rather than real conversion data, so please don't quote them as gospel, but they do give stakeholders something more interesting to argue about than personal taste. I was insufferable for the rest of the day.
Where Marcus and I disagree
I made the case for a digital-first approach, where you start with the personality and the principles rather than the letterhead, get UX, accessibility, content, and frontend people into the room while the decisions are still being made, design actual interface elements instead of stationery, and use the website as the place where the brand gets proven with real content on a small screen before it ever reaches print.
Marcus' counterargument
Marcus has tried that more than once and reckons it falls apart in practice, because running the digital interpretation alongside or ahead of the main branding project leaves nobody clearly in charge, and Headscape's opinion carries very little weight while the brand itself is still up in the air. He'd rather let the branding agency finish and get everything signed off, then arrive afterward with the client already warned that interpreting it for digital will mean changes, the typeface being the almost inevitable first casualty. He also pointed out that very few branding agencies build anything, which is a fair argument for keeping the two jobs apart.
Where we landed
I came round to that as the more practical position, with one condition attached, which is that whatever gets handed over has to be understood as a starting point for digital rather than a finished artifact that must never be questioned by anyone with a browser.
Consistency, not uniformity
The phrase I keep coming back to came from Neil Eastell at the National Trust years ago, and it's consistency, not uniformity. A brand system that works online is one that's clear about what has to stay fixed and honest about what's allowed to bend, so the logo keeps its essential form while picking up responsive versions, the core colors stay recognizable while gaining accessible digital variants, and the typographic personality survives a change of body typeface for the sake of download size or legibility, as long as nobody wanders off from a serif to a sans serif and hopes we won't spot it. Think of it as a jazz standard rather than a military march, where everyone is playing the same tune but there's room to improvise around it.
Questions worth asking
- Which parts of this identity genuinely express the personality, and which are just habits nobody has questioned?
- Was this rule written for screens, or copied across from print because it was already sitting in the document?
- What user or business outcome does it protect, if any?
- Does it still hold up on a small phone, at 200% zoom, in bright sunlight?
- What does that logo honestly look like as a favicon?
- How are you getting feedback on the brand from users rather than only from the board?
- When brand compliance and readability disagree, which one wins, and who gets to decide?
The practical takeaway
Whatever you do, don't open with a demand for a rebrand, because that conversation is over before it starts and you'll be the difficult one for the rest of the project. Find the specific places where the brand rules and basic usability are openly at war, fix the ones doing the most damage, measure what changes, and use that evidence to earn permission for the bigger conversation later on. And when you hit a wall, offer to test the brand-safe version against a looser one and let the numbers do the arguing for you, because a brand guardian will happily fight your opinion all afternoon but they'll rarely take on their own users.
A brand exists to build recognition and trust, so when protecting the rules starts eating away at both, we're guarding the wrong thing entirely. Or, to put it the way I put it on the show, be a bit more flexible about your bloody brand guidelines.
And because Marcus got his plug in twice, here is Headscape.
Marcus' Joke
When a TV antenna married another TV antenna, the service wasn't great, but the reception was amazing!
Marcus fluffed the delivery, which if anything improved it.
Download audio: https://cdn.simplecast.com/media/audio/transcoded/eea3ff50-d316-4ff7-b8db-24c157eb37ff/ae88e41b-a26d-4404-8e81-f97bca80d60d/episodes/audio/group/bd754d64-e6e9-4c74-a461-a85ac412892d/group-item/55840531-f4db-427d-b95a-6ea7fdf75e10/128_default_tc.mp3?aid=rss_feed&feed=XJ3MbVN3
