Edition 002 –
Migrating Frames Year After Year
A reference collection to help demystify a set of oft-replicated documents used to frame ideas and products within a coded system that reflects the values of the culture (for good or for worse).
French design agency Area 17 offers a kind of transparency and openness that is so rare for a corporate agency to offer. Their backlog of 'deliverables' for clients are published to an archive, and to anyone working outside of this kind of branding, advertising, or marketing field, or someone hoping to break in, this type of openness reveals the expectations and language of the field. When I worked at an agency and saw these same types of documents in the internal archives, I was still limited by the single agency's particular expectations re: brand guides and strategy documents.
In the spirit of that transparency, Migrating Frames Year After Year offers a collection of brand guides, strategy documents, and trend reports to help designers learn the language, structure, and expectations of commercial design.
Brand guides are, optimistically, a translation of artistic intention and social values into corporate language, and more cynically, they are a fundamental aspect of how corporations and institutions perpetuate and maintain their capital value (worth) over time and at scale.
The field of design often takes the motifs it employs for granted, much like how a writer might take the individual letters and language they employ as a given. But language, like design, is part of a symbolic system that people within a culture can use to communicate. Language applies conceptual ideas to the tangible physical world and encourages and even dictates how we think, and in-turn, language evolves while it helps shape, communicate and pass on culture. This same logic applies to the field of design, although design's history is tied to marketing, capital, and perpetuating a particular set of western neoliberal values.
Design is about drawing on cultural associations - let's say you want to create a museum website. To start, you would scan through a dozen museum websites and then re-construct something that visually and strategically fits neatly in with that group - and bang, now you've got a website that looks and feels like a cultural institution! It perfectly fits within the cultural idea of what a museum looks like online.
So, while brand guides might be an end result of the product/designer relationship, strategy happens near the beginning. Strategy is even more amorphous and unclear to those outside of the industry.
Strategy is also where design can extend out of simply visually codifying or communicating corporate values, and into strategic consulting. It's not quite marketing, not quite branding. Strategy and forecasting aren't directly tied to the client and lets the agency/seller position themselves as an authoritative voice through their own design artifacts.
These documents were helpful resources when I needed to learn how to translate visual language into corporate language to make money.
Archive Download: 34 Brand Decks, 6 Strategy/Discovery Documents, 24 Trend Reports
Edition 002 –
Migrating Frames Year After Year
A reference collection to help demystify a set of oft-replicated documents used to frame ideas and products within a coded system that reflects the values of the culture (for good or for worse).
French design agency Area 17 offers a kind of transparency and openness that is so rare for a corporate agency to offer. Their backlog of 'deliverables' for clients are published to an archive, and to anyone working outside of this kind of branding, advertising, or marketing field, or someone hoping to break in, this type of openness reveals the expectations and language of the field. When I worked at an agency and saw these same types of documents in the internal archives, I was still limited by the single agency's particular expectations re: brand guides and strategy documents.
In the spirit of that transparency, Migrating Frames Year After Year offers a collection of brand guides, strategy documents, and trend reports to help designers learn the language, structure, and expectations of commercial design.
Brand guides are, optimistically, a translation of artistic intention and social values into corporate language, and more cynically, they are a fundamental aspect of how corporations and institutions perpetuate and maintain their capital value (worth) over time and at scale.
The field of design often takes the motifs it employs for granted, much like how a writer might take the individual letters and language they employ as a given. But language, like design, is part of a symbolic system that people within a culture can use to communicate. Language applies conceptual ideas to the tangible physical world and encourages and even dictates how we think, and in-turn, language evolves while it helps shape, communicate and pass on culture. This same logic applies to the field of design, although design's history is tied to marketing, capital, and perpetuating a particular set of western neoliberal values.
Design is about drawing on cultural associations - let's say you want to create a museum website. To start, you would scan through a dozen museum websites and then re-construct something that visually and strategically fits neatly in with that group - and bang, now you've got a website that looks and feels like a cultural institution! It perfectly fits within the cultural idea of what a museum looks like online.
So, while brand guides might be an end result of the product/designer relationship, strategy happens near the beginning. Strategy is even more amorphous and unclear to those outside of the industry.
Strategy is also where design can extend out of simply visually codifying or communicating corporate values, and into strategic consulting. It's not quite marketing, not quite branding. Strategy and forecasting aren't directly tied to the client and lets the agency/seller position themselves as an authoritative voice through their own design artifacts.
These documents were helpful resources when I needed to learn how to translate visual language into corporate language to make money.
Archive Download: 34 Brand Decks, 6 Strategy/Discovery Documents, 24 Trend Reports