HotButton: HotButton: …the point I was trying to make about general respect for brand integrity…

I remember a discussion along these lines on the old forum about altering social media logo colors to make them all line up nicely and match the website being designed.

Since the social media company’s business models depended on unpaid, prominent links from other websites to theirs, it would be counterproductive and unlikely for them to make a fuss over minor alternations to their logos — especially given that it had become common practice to do so.

So legal questions aside, the first argument was that a website designer should honor and adhere to the brand guidelines of the individual social media companies.

The second argument was that the designer’s priority was to the client and the website being designed — not the brand guidelines of another company.

I agreed with the second argument and still do. If, for example, Twitter was paying to have their logo on the website and that payment came with exacting requirements, fine, that’s what I would do. In the absence of that, however, my first concern would be the website I was designing, not Twitter’s branding guidelines.

I guess what I’m saying is that I see nothing inviolable about another company’s branding preferences — their branding is their concern, not everyone else’s. There might be practical, monetary, contractual and, sometimes, legal considerations, but in the absence of these things, I see no principled imperative whatsoever in following the internal rules of another company — especially when doing so runs counter to my or my client’s interests.

When I worked at a newspaper, we would often get requests from companies about how to use their names in stories. For example, a hypothetical company with the legal name Astrid Industrial Nut and Bolt Manufacturing International, Inc. might have sent us a note requesting that we use the full legal name of their company in first reference in any story mentioning them.

Those requests would be read then mostly ignored since our interests were in clarity to our readers who knew the company simply as Astrid, not the long, cumbersome legal name the company, for whatever reason, preferred.