Every brand system should assume someone new will inherit it.
One way that I determine principles for my work is by paying attention to the decisions I make for my clients over the course of a project. My design work sometimes requires making dozens of decisions every minute, as I shuffle through design principles in my mind to achieve balance in a layout, resizing and moving content and running through the way my decisions affect the flow of information to a viewer.
The same process applies when the work moves beyond visual design and into systems design: how will I create a process that is most likely to be adopted by my client? Looking back at those decisions helps me identify principles that I have been applying intuitively, but haven't yet put into words.
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 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.
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. Small decisions like this are what protect the internal staff’s capacity, and protect a communications process over time.
Reflecting on this one decision has helped me articulate something I have been doing intuitively in my work for nonprofits:
Every brand system should assume someone new will inherit it.
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.
The principle extends well beyond websites. It applies 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.