Personalities build meaningful relationships, not looks. Sure, looks are important. They form an important impression, and can create an instant, and powerful, attraction. But the perception of looks is deeply affected by the personality behind them.
Effective design is exactly the same. Styling can give you the good looks, but there's no depth to the personality: there's nothing to form and maintain a relationship with. Surface styling is easy, design solutions are hard.
When redesigning an existing site, it is tempting to focus on the visual styling alone. Expressions like 're-wallpapering' and 're-skinning' are often used to actually request this type of shallow re-styling: the hope being that a new 'look' will solve every existing problem. It will not. More often than not, this type of thinking caused the problems in the first place.
Online, defining a meaningful brand personality requires a blend of visual, verbal and crucially, interactive attributes. Trying to do the job with only visual tools will give your site a new coat of paint, but the cracks will still be there underneath.
'Re-skinning' is akin to taking a car that drives badly, giving it a good-looking new body, and expecting it to be a great success. It will look good in the showroom, but as soon as the first driving critic tries it, it's back to square one. And if some people do buy it, tempted by the looks alone, their disappointment in the long term may damage the manufacturers brand irrevocably.
Instead, the focus of the creative element of a redesign programme should be on creating a deeper brand personality that engages your customers on all levels, not just looks.
We are ignoring other branding assets like sound here as they are not a prevalent part of online brand personality. Most people dislike sound on websites, although its value in branding generally should not be underestimated. And there are instances, particularly in sites targeting children (or where music is part of the offer) where it can be an effective part of the brand personality online.
At a visual level, we need to define a visual language: a set of visual elements (from colours to photography) that act as the vocabulary; and a set of rules (the grammar), that define how they should be used together. This combination of elements and composition is unique to your organisation and should present it in a distinctive and consistent manner.
A well-defined visual language should deliver both consistency and flexibility, allowing differing areas of your site to be treated in differing ways, all within a unifying theme. This language should extend out to other supporting materials that do not have an interactive dimension, like downloadable documents and presentations and those that are at least partially interactive, like email newsletters.
Where a strong brand exists, the online visual language will be an extension of it, fitting into an overall brand personality applied across all marketing and communication channels. Extending the visual language in this instance needs care and attention as few brands, even today, are created with enough sensitivity towards online communications.
Where the parent brand is weak, the online visual language can play a major part in redefining or strengthening it. Regularly, in our experience, defining the online brand language plays a major part in re-invigorating a parent brand. In fact the exercise often expands out to encompass a programme of work to update the higher-level brand. This sideways expansion may not be the perfect way to refresh a brand, but it is often easier to accomplish than a top-down process, and in organisations that are online-focused it may be an appropriate and successful process to follow.
Alongside the visual language, an online brand is defined by how your customers will interact with it. If a site looks great but is hard to use, it will not have a positive effect on your customers.
In fact online, the interaction model (the way people use your site) is at least as important as the visual language. This makes information architecture, the process of defining the organisation of content and services, a crucial factor in defining brand personality. A well-thought out interaction model will make an enormous contribution to how well a brand is perceived, let alone how successful the site is commercially.
In a redesign context, time needs to be invested in assessing where the strengths and weaknesses are in the existing design scheme before moving on to define a new one. Assuming that has been done, shaping the information architecture of the new site may resolve many of the problems without a new visual language.
However, combine a powerful visual language and an intelligent approach to interaction and your new site will have a brand personality that is capable of engaging customers and ensuring that they maintain a long-term relationship with your organisation.