Every brand system should assume someone new will inherit it.
Design principles and system design principles
When I am working on a visual design project like an annual report, there are a set of design principles that guide the work. Design principles are standard, taught in schools and known by all visual designers. They include things like balance, hierarchy, rhythm and contrast. The visual design process can require making dozens of decisions a minute, shuffling through principles to achieve a balanced layout, resizing and moving content and running through the way each decision affects the flow of information to a viewer.
But the work of communication design extends beyond individual design executions, and includes the design of systems: what are repeatable layouts that can adapt across platforms? What palette will be cohesive and flexible enough to flex with an organization as it grows? What is a process that is most likely to be adopted by a client with limited time? What process will be intuitive with the least amount of training?
One of the principles I find myself returning to when developing processes is this: Every brand system should assume someone new will inherit it.
Systems design comes into play in daily decisions for nonprofit communications
To illustrate what I mean, I’ll share an example from this week. Without going into too much technical detail, I was working on a project that required using Squarespace's blog feature as a content management system for a collection of links to external earned media stories. This is a common approach for making the most of squarespace’s built-in tools, but it creates a side effect: every entry also generates a "ghost" page within the website. Even though this collection is set up so that the title links send visitors to the original article source, the ghost page still exists within Squarespace, and there are situations where someone can land on it.
There are several ways to deal with the issue of ghost pages, and each one provides a different experience for the user while requiring a different amount of labor from the person managing the site.
The method that provides the best experience for the user involves setting up individual redirects for the ghost pages, so that even if someone lands on one, they are automatically taken to the intended destination.
However, this method requires creating a URL map for each individual ghost page through the site's developer tools. It is not intuitive, and there are no visible fragments of the redirect process embedded within the publishing workflow that would help someone who inherits the work become aware of this step or uncover it through investigating the process.
The alternative method, which is the one I ultimately chose, is to add an excerpt of the external content to the ghost pages along with a button or text link to the original source. That way, if someone lands on the page accidentally, they can still find their way to the content they were expecting.
For the user, this experience may not be ideal because it adds an extra step before they can reach the content they are looking for.
But for the nonprofit communications manager who maintains the site, the second method has important benefits:
It is something they can do intuitively as they add content.
It does not require knowledge of the process to be held outside of the process itself.
When someone new takes on this responsibility, it is easy to learn through discovery. They can simply look at how the preceding posts were set up and do the same thing.
TLDR; processes should be inheritable
The decision meant accepting a small amount of friction for an occasional visitor in exchange for a process that a team could successfully maintain for years.
When we make our decisions based on the assumption that someone new will someday need to operate in the system we have created, we protect the internal staff’s capacity, and protect a communications process over time.
This is what the principle means in practice:
If internal capacity doesn't allow for documentation of the brand and its processes, then those things need to be encoded into the processes themselves.
Systems principles apply to everything.
They apply to templates, brand guidelines, governance, and every other communication system an organization depends on. When knowledge lives inside the process itself, the organization becomes less dependent on institutional memory and better equipped to sustain its work through growth, change, and staff transitions.