Personalities build meaningful relationships, not looks.
Sure, looks are important. They form an important impression, and can create an instant, and powerful, attraction. But the perception of looks is deeply affected by the personality behind them.
Effective design is exactly the same. Styling can give you the good looks, but there's no depth to the personality: there's nothing to form and maintain a relationship with. Surface styling is easy, design solutions are hard.
When redesigning an existing site, it is tempting to focus on the visual styling alone. Expressions like 're-wallpapering' and 're-skinning' are often used to actually request this type of shallow re-styling: the hope being that a new 'look' will solve every existing problem. It will not. More often than not, this type of thinking caused the problems in the first place.
Online, defining a meaningful brand personality requires a blend of visual, verbal and crucially, interactive attributes. Trying to do the job with only visual tools will give your site a new coat of paint, but the cracks will still be there underneath.
'Re-skinning' is akin to taking a car that drives badly, giving it a good-looking new body, and expecting it to be a great success. It will look good in the showroom, but as soon as the first driving critic tries it, it's back to square one. And if some people do buy it, tempted by the looks alone, their disappointment in the long term may damage the manufacturers brand irrevocably.
Instead, the focus of the creative element of a redesign programme should be on creating a deeper brand personality that engages your customers on all levels, not just looks.
We are ignoring other branding assets like sound here as they are not a prevalent part of online brand personality. Most people dislike sound on websites, although its value in branding generally should not be underestimated. And there are instances, particularly in sites targeting children (or where music is part of the offer) where it can be an effective part of the brand personality online.
At a visual level, we need to define a visual language: a set of visual elements (from colours to photography) that act as the vocabulary; and a set of rules (the grammar), that define how they should be used together. This combination of elements and composition is unique to your organisation and should present it in a distinctive and consistent manner.
A well-defined visual language should deliver both consistency and flexibility, allowing differing areas of your site to be treated in differing ways, all within a unifying theme. This language should extend out to other supporting materials that do not have an interactive dimension, like downloadable documents and presentations and those that are at least partially interactive, like email newsletters.
If you think this article will be of use to someone else, fill in their details below and we will email a link to them.
Each time we create a new Viewpoint article, we can notify you by email.