Good branding results in less chaos and less noise.
Even more than a great logo, the thing that makes our branding actually "work" is doing the same things over and over again. We use our logo in one of only a few arrangements, without altering layouts or colors. We use the same fonts or family of fonts across web and print designs. For all our designs we draw from our core color palette and make sure every color we use complements them.
For our website styling, we use a well-designed framework of "classes." Classes are web-specific styles and formatting applied in the website's stylesheets, or
CSS, or sometimes within <style> tags in code blocks. This creates a consistent look sitewide. (When you see text on this page with a preceding dot—like
.c-h1—that's an example of a class. If this concept seems fuzzy—don't worry, this is meant for our nerdy website-building friends!)
Using a system of classes is a shorthand way for designers/developers to quickly create page elements without having to remember and/or type out the specifications every single time. For example, you don't have to know a color code to make a background our main color, just put
.c-bg-accent.
Since styles live in one place, it also lets us make sweeping changes instead of going page, by page,
by page (potentially hundreds of them). Nope, just change the styling for
.c-text-m once, and it magically applies
everywhere. (If you're a designer/developer reading this, it may help to know we're using a modified version of the
OxyNinja Core framework, which you can
get a cheatsheet for here.)
