Fracture | Hearts and Minds

Institutions have a character, just like people do.

“In fact, it is impossible to not have an institutional character or image. It is the sum total of a person’s experience of our staff, our physical plant, our programming and services, our communications — everything we say and do. Every person out there experiences a different assortment of these expressions, but they average out to define our institutional character or persona. This character cannot be contrived. If it is contrived it will only fool people for a little while. Like a person you know who says he is one thing but whose daily behavior suggests another.”

I wrote something recently about this for Fracture, trying to explain this to potential clients as one of the things I love about commercial design (because people fascinate me, and companies, as above, are just the voices and actions of the people behind them, aggregated and averaged out). Chris Pullman has put it infinitely better than I did though. Nice article.