Meridian Housing looks after about four thousand homes across two counties. When they came to me in 2025 they had a logo, a colour they were fond of, and eleven years of printed material made by whoever needed it that week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The important fact about the project was in the first meeting, and it was not about design. Meridian employs no designers, and had no plans to. Every newsletter, site board, door notice and rent leaflet is made by housing officers, repairs schedulers and one very capable administrator, usually between two other jobs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So the brief was not “a brand”. It was a brand that works when the person using it has fifteen minutes, a laptop and no interest in typography.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Two typefaces, one for headings and one for everything else, both free and both installed by IT rather than downloaded by staff. Six colours: one for each of the four neighbourhoods, plus black and a warm grey. One rule for photography, which is that it shows the place rather than models.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The logo stayed. It was fine, it was known, and replacing it would have spent the budget on the one thing nobody was complaining about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The deliverable that mattered was not the twenty-page document. It was eleven templates in the software they already have: the newsletter, the site board, the notice that goes through a door when a repair is booked, the rent statement cover, the recruitment advert.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each one has the colour and the type locked, an image box the right shape, and a line of grey text at the top explaining what goes where. You cannot easily make an ugly one, and you cannot accidentally use last year’s logo, because it is not in the file.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Site boards are the part the public sees most and the part designers usually leave to a contractor. We wrote three rules a site manager can follow without ringing anybody: the board is one of two sizes, the name of the scheme is always the largest thing on it, and the neighbourhood colour is the band across the top.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then we had a set printed and stood in front of them in the rain, which is where you learn that your beautiful thin typeface disappears at fifteen metres.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Six months in, the administrator sent me a folder of things the team had made. Nine out of eleven were right. The two that were not were both the same mistake, an image box stretched to fit a photo of the wrong shape, which told me more usefully than any review that the template needed a note and a crop guide, so I added both.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That is the test of a system for non-designers: not whether it looks good in the case study, but whether the fiftieth thing made without you is still recognisably the same organisation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I would have spent less time on the guidelines document and more time sitting with the people who use the templates. The hour I spent with the repairs team, watching one of them make a door notice, changed the system more than the week I spent writing rules about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If your organisation has no designers, say so at the start of the brief. It is not an embarrassment. It is the single most useful constraint you can give me, and it changes almost everything about what I build.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Meridian Housing has no designers. Its newsletters, site boards and door notices are made by housing officers between other jobs, so the brand system had to survive being used by people with fifteen minutes and a laptop.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":116,"featured_media":69,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-case-studies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/colorlibhub.com\/unapp-portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/colorlibhub.com\/unapp-portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/colorlibhub.com\/unapp-portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colorlibhub.com\/unapp-portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/116"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colorlibhub.com\/unapp-portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/colorlibhub.com\/unapp-portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colorlibhub.com\/unapp-portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/colorlibhub.com\/unapp-portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colorlibhub.com\/unapp-portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colorlibhub.com\/unapp-portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}