What an identity system contains

A logo is one drawing. An identity system is the full set of parts a brand uses to look like itself, together with the written rules for how those parts combine, and it exists so that people who have never met the designer can make new things that still look right. The minimum working set is the mark and its permitted lockups, a type system with defined roles, a palette with stated proportions, a grid or spatial logic, a direction for photography or illustration, and a rule for icons. None of these parts is complicated. What makes them a system is that each one has been decided and written down. Miss one and it will be invented at speed by whoever is making the thing on the deadline, usually badly and usually for good.

Most designers learn the idea from the Munich Olympics of 1972. Otl Aicher's design department gave the Games a palette of seven colours plus white, built around a light blue, and left out red, gold and black because those colours were tied to the Berlin Games of 1936. The typeface was Univers, and the sports pictograms were drawn to one geometric scheme so that every figure belonged to the same family. The rules went out in 1969 in a light blue ring binder. Tickets, signs, posters, uniforms and printed guides were then made by many different hands, and they still read as one event. That is the whole purpose.

The mark comes first, because much of the rest is measured from it. A brand rarely needs one arrangement of it. It needs three or four fixed lockups for the shapes of space it will actually meet, such as a wide one for a website header, a stacked one for a square post and the symbol alone for an app icon. Each lockup also needs colourways, meaning approved versions for light backgrounds, dark backgrounds and one-colour printing. Clear space, the empty zone around the mark, is set in a unit taken from the mark itself, such as the height of a letter or the width of a stroke, so the rule holds at every size. Minimum size is found by testing. Print the mark smaller and smaller on the material it will really appear on, and the last size before the detail closes up is your minimum.

Type and colour are written as roles rather than lists. A type system says which face sets headlines, which sets long text, which sets figures in a table, and which common font stands in when the brand face cannot load, as in most emails and shared documents. A palette says which colour leads and roughly how much of a surface each one covers. The grid decides margins, columns and where the logo sits. Nobody notices it until it is missing. Mastercard shows what a system held for years can earn. In January 2019 the company said its research had found that over 80 per cent of people recognised its two interlocking circles without the name, and it began using the symbol alone on cards, in shops and at the events it sponsors.

Photography needs written direction too. That direction says what the light is like, who is cast and how they are framed, and what never appears, and it puts wrong examples beside right ones so a photographer can see where the rule ends. Icons need a rule of their own, usually a drawing grid with one stroke weight and one corner shape, so that an icon drawn next year matches one drawn today. Many systems also carry a graphic device, such as a pattern, a shape or a way of cropping, which appears far more often than the logo. Some add a sound. Each of these parts gets its own lesson later in the module.

Working designers build a system from its hardest use backwards. A mark drawn at poster scale and then reduced almost always fails as a 16-pixel favicon or as embroidery on a shirt, and fixing it at that stage means redrawing the mark and reprinting everything that carries it. A mark that survives sixteen pixels and a needle will scale up without trouble. They derive rules instead of choosing them. When clear space comes from the mark and every size comes from one unit, the system is easier to explain, easier to follow and harder to argue with in a meeting.