Most larger agencies are great at creating inspiring design guidelines. The problem, however, is that guideline documents rarely account for the limited capacity of the teams who are supposed to use them.
Having led international campaigns for several global organisations, I have come to learn that most campaign work targeting an international market—regardless organisation—are created following a similar structure where the head-office define a foundational campaign strategy but leave room for their satellite offices to adapt copy and visuals.
Typically, a number of adverts are produced (film and still) together with design templates for print and digital, which are distributed to each local market together with general campaign guidelines. Because of cultural differences, some of the local offices might then decide to, for example, re-shoot campaign photography using their own models, and also might adapt tone of the copy to their local culture.
Creating campaign guidelines that are easy to adapt to diverse cultural perception models is vital—particularly in international campaigns—but also can be a huge challenge. To create cross-cultural design guidelines, you need to have a profound understanding of how cultural differences of your target markets are manifested in the perception of design, which is well represented in Hofstede’s theory of dimensions of culture (Hofstede, 2017).
In addition to creating guidelines that are adapted to the culture of each target market, it also is imperative that the core visual concept can be easily reproduced by local design teams. If, for example, photography guidelines are presented by photography made by a photographer with a distinct style; what often happens is that you get into a situation where a local market won’t be able to conform to the stated photograph guidelines as they can’t find a photographer with the same style. I have seen this first-hand many times, latest working with an international product launch for one of the world’s largest consumer brands were we had to fly our photographer to India, as the photography made by the local branch was not in-line with our quality guidelines which delayed the campaign for almost three months.
The importance of creating visual strategies that are not dependent on the distinct style of a particular photographer is also important when creating visual strategies for smaller organisations.
While many organisations work with external freelancers and agencies to create design strategies; many also have an in-house team responsible for creating day-to-day assets, such as brochures and one-shot adverts. In my experience, what often happens in set-ups where an external agency has been responsible for creating design guidelines, is that the in-house team after the hand-over many times do not have the skills or the capacity to follow the carefully crafted guidelines created by the top-designers of the agency, resulting in the internal team dispelling them.
The takeaway is that design guidelines to be successfully followed and used by all relevant entities of an organisation need to be easy to follow and implement—also after the people creating them left the building.
- References
- Hofstede, Geert. Geert-hofstede.com. N.p., 2017. Web. 5 June 2017.
- Hall, Stuart. Stuart Halls Model Of Encoding And Decoding. 1st ed. 1973. Web. 5 June 2017.