branchandroot

This is coming out of several conversations I've had lately, which finally reached critical mass. Have some thoughts about website design.

Marketing departments the world over, plus a lot of individuals with sites and blogs, are wedded to the importance of branding, on a web site. I can understand why. If you're offering any kind of product at all, well, you want people to know at a glance who provided it.

Alas, this passion for recognition tends to run away with people's brains. And hide them.

Consider a university website running courseware (courseware being one of those software packages that lets students and instructors do assignments, interaction, grading and other class-related things online). These sites are, with very few exceptions, not open to the public. They contain privileged information and, in the US, it would be illegal to allow the anyone outside the university access to any student's assignments or grades without elaborate written permission (thank you FERPA). Does this part of the site need to have the university's three inch tall banner running across the top of every page? No, it does not. The students already know perfectly well what university they're going to. The instructors know what university employs them. All branding does in this instance is waste three inches of screen space, and possibly annoy people if it was added clumsily enough.

Consider an independent musician's site. It is important to have the logo, and if there is no logo the motifs, of the musician on every page. These motifs should not, however, interfere with the primary function of the site, which is to help people find and listen to the music clips, locate the next show, and, most importantly, give the musician money. If the site navigation is made of images in peculiar fonts or, worse, no text at all, if the cursor is some strange and non-pointing shape, if the complexity of the background makes it hard to read the next show date, then all the superfluity of branding will accomplish is to help people remember exactly whose site they had such a bad experience with.

Consider a site that employs, as part of its branding motif, the vocabulary of mental illness. Some people will find that charming or amusing, but others will find it insulting and demeaning of real people's pain. (I'm sorry, man, you're a good guy but it was an insensitive choice.)

The moral of the story, here, is that bad branding is counterproductive. One wants to stand out, to be remembered, but the best way to do that is with a reasonably simple and stable "look" and a logo that involves your name in a readable fashion. Baroque images and fonts, banner logos in inappropriate places, "cute" thematic names, these may well brand you but you might not like what they brand you as.