Trim the excess

Simple way to build some climate-first-ness into your offering:

Trim the excess.

Say you’re a brand designer, and you’ve been hired to create a new brand identity for your client.

A simple excess that a brand designer might add is a brand guidelines document, usually a PDF – which can become a slippery slope.

Once you’ve added the logo with all it’s special guidelines, the fonts, and the colour palette… and it’s only 5 pages… you might be tempted to pad things up a bit.

There are LOTS of articles online about how a designer should build a brand guidelines document – I disagree with almost all of them.

Unless your client has specifically asked for them, it’s not your job to add all these extras that, deep down, you know will be ignored.

Some of them, along with just one reason to not do them, are:

• Creating an icon set (you’ll spend longer on this than a logo)
• Adding a “tone of voice” section (leave that to a copywriter)
• Adding a “What we’re all about” section (unless your client asked for this, wrote it themselves, or had a copywriter provide it, leave it out)
• Adding “Mission, Vision, and Values” (these take time, need buy-in, and now you’re really just padding this thing out)

Yet so many articles advise designers to do this.

Part of embracing a climate-first approach is to dial-down the extras (especially if they’re just padding), and rigidly stick to what your client has asked for.