Achieve (Compelling) Visual Coherence: Build a Brand Identity Toolkit That's Flexible, Durable, Shareable—and Yours

In today's decentralized, tweeting, demand-printed, www universe, achieving compelling visual coherence is tough.

There's an ever-widening range of communications that need to consistently express your brand (and an e-newsletter has requirements and opportunities that are different from a brochure's or a microsite's); people far outside any marketing department have the tools to make communications (and do); and even if an organization masters its own staff, others are creating communications outside your walls, 24/7, that affect your brand.

In the 1930s, corporate identity's US "inventors"—Egbert Jacobson for Container Corporation of America, Henry Dreyfuss for the 20th Century Limited/New York Central—identified and realized an opportunity that is still important to us.

They understood that the more communications reinforced one another visually, the easier and faster constituents would come to know and recognize a corporation or program. And if what was given coherence was also visually compelling, that coherence translated into increased interest, participation, loyalty, and value.

Mid-century practitioners—think Chermayeff & Geismar for Mobil or Paul Rand for UPS—brought increased discipline: Guidelines (rules, really) ensured that every Mobil sign, pump, and can of oil came together to dominate the vehicular landscape.

But those ace communicators and their clients had it easier than we do now. Though a UPS truck is not the same as the driver's outfit, corporate-identity practitioners had a finite and somewhat standard list of applications to which to apply their skills. More important, those applications were controlled from headquarters.

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