Is the demand for content creation changing the way we design for brands?

It’s a well-known idea, as Marshal McLuhan put it ‘The Medium is the Message’. You can read more about this in his famed essay here. However, essentially the idea is that the vehicle of communication that you choose for your message will always have an impact on the message that is received at the other end. 

Your brand is what you are on social media, it’s what your audience will see on a day-to-day basis. So it’s nothing new to say that social media has changed how we communicate, but is it also changing what we design, and what ideas get left on the ‘maybe one day’ pile? 

It used to be that brands would market their products and services through their websites, and print outputs. Maybe their website would be updated with a few blog articles (at best) a quarter. But the volume of content that brands needed to create was far, far less. 

Because of that, it was much easier for them to outsource any design that these comms needed to external agencies and freelancers. The vast increase in demand for on-brand content means that this just isn’t possible. Not only from a cost perspective but from a time perspective, there just isn’t the time to brief, workshop and finalise every social media post, blog article post, and email newsletter. 

We have seen our work change from predominantly roll out and ongoing work for brands, towards setting up brands to be able to do things for themselves, as and when they need to. This means templates and guidelines! 

So if you are creating a brand from scratch, or rebranding,  you would be wise to keep in mind, that the brand’s main expression may well be through templates. This means creating not just beautiful designs, designing systems. Systems that are flexible and can be used by anyone at any time. 

Considering how a brand will be executed day to day, it’s something that becomes very clear when looking at the differences between what is shown on a design studio’s case study for the brand, and then what is actually on the brand’s social media, their website etc. If there is a vast difference in quality between the two, wouldn’t it be better to create something that was good in reality and not just in theory?

For example, it would be risky to create a brand whose imagery always requires a specific filter to be placed on it, or whose colour palette is informed by the content of the images that it will be used with.

So what are we losing and what are we gaining from designing with templates in mind?  We want to create brands that always look good, not only in the places where designers could be commissioned. But if we are always focused on creating brands that can be templated, are we dismissing design solutions that have a more distinct beauty to them? Or as the tools we use to create templates get more sophisticated, is there a way to bring some of this nuance back into our brand’s day-to-day communication? Or will it always be less than what a trained human eye can create? I think the latter is likely. 

If you are struggling to retain your brand’s stand out whilst also ensuring it is practical, get in touch.