Measuring drift: Building smart, adaptable systems to help your type flex with your brand
Charles Nix, senior executive creative director at Monotype, explores how typography moves through the complex systems behind modern brands and why making typographic drift visible is critical to maintaining brand coherence.
Entropy. En-tro-py. I love the word. I love the sound of it. It’s beautiful to me as a thing.
Of course, I love what it means. Entropy is not disorder itself. It is the measure of disorder. There’s hope in that distinction: that by measuring something, we can understand it better, and that through that understanding, we can influence it.
Brands, and the design systems that govern them, are prone to entropy. They begin as considered, ordered expressions of intent. Logos, colors, typography, imagery, voice and materials assembled as a coherent whole.
This is the stuff of press releases and design blogs: new looks, rethinks, refreshes – brimming with pride and optimism.
Then the systems enter the world. Teams grow. Agencies change. Expressions and applications proliferate. Mergers and acquisitions take place. New products are launched. Markets expand. Technologies evolve.
Creating a brand system – or even part of one – is challenging work, but it’s nothing compared to maintaining and evolving it. Even a well-run brand system is a marvel of interconnected people, assets, workflows, technologies and outputs, all moving in concert toward a common vision.
Consider a single font within a larger brand ecosystem. It is selected, licensed, deployed, documented, distributed, localised, updated and governed. It moves through teams, technologies, agencies and markets before it ever reaches the customer. It may seem effortless to the reader, but the systems behind it are anything but.
Typography is brand glue. The charismatic logo and evocative colours garner the most attention, but typography shoulders most of the burden. Packaging, advertising, websites, apps, presentations, content and countless other customer touchpoints rely on typography. It carries the brand promise in a tagline. It communicates nutritional facts on a package, directions on office signage, answers in an FAQ, and instructions in an app. It appears on the billboard, the banner ad, the press release, the email newsletter, the product announcement and social media post. Few brand assets travel as widely or appear as often. It is a nearly omnipresent brand asset.
With that much type in play, and as brands (and brands of brands) grow, typography becomes an essential operational layer. It is deeply enmeshed in creative operations whether those operations are explicitly addressed or not.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s hot or cold outside, rain or shine, there is weather.
Whether anyone is paying attention or not, typography is moving through systems, workflows, technologies and teams.
Typography never sleeps.
The typographic layer in creative operations is about observing and managing how typography functions within an organisation. Counting and qualifying fonts, mapping typographic workflows, auditing font-governance models and assessing brand assets – these are not typographic operations any more than entropy (the measure of disorder) is disorder itself. The measurement reveals the operation.
There is no elimination of typographic entropy. That is not the goal. Brand systems are living systems. They need to flex, adapt and grow. The goal is coherence – movement toward the ideal.
Like all living systems, brand systems will drift. Left unmanaged, that drift can impact recognition, weaken brand consistency, and erode customer trust. Managed well, it allows brands to evolve while maintaining coherence across teams, markets, technologies and customer experiences.
