I judge car park signs.
There I said it.
Not in a clipboard-and-hi-vis way. More in the way designers notice things most wouldn’t. Bad kerning on a menu. A stretched logo on a PowerPoint. A laminated A3 sign taped to a reception desk that suggests temporary but has clearly been there since 2019.
Car park signs are a good one though, because nobody seems to think they matter.
They’re rarely in the brand guidelines. They don’t make the launch film. Few put them in the agency case study next to the moody logo animation.
But they are often one of the first actual bits of brand a customer experiences. Before the reception desk, before the showroom, before the meeting. Before anyone has said hello. What they say, without meaning to, is: “this is where we ran out of care”.
I see this a lot with the small, practical stuff. The unglamorous, slightly annoying things that sit between the proper marketing work: Signs, forms, handover packs, Service reminders, Sales sheets, Internal comms, email templates, reception notices. The printout someone made quickly because nobody wanted to “waste budget” doing it properly. Increasingly, the printout is AI slop and trying to do too much. Far too much.
There, I said that too.
The problem is that customers don’t separate these things from the brand.
Customers just experience the business.
So when the campaign looks expensive but the wayfinding is confusing, that’s the brand.
When the website sounds warm but the confirmation email sounds like a tax demand, that’s the brand.
When the showroom is beautiful but the handover document looks like it was assembled during a fire drill, that’s the brand.
The boring bits are not a break from the brand. They are where the brand has to do some actual work.
Not everything needs to be lavish – nobody needs a beautifully art-directed “please use the other entrance” sign.
But it should feel considered. Clear. Useful. Like it came from the same organisation as all the shiny stuff.
Care is cumulative. You can feel when it runs through a business, and you can definitely feel where it stops.
At We Are Acuity, we don’t just design the big brand moments. We worry about the bits taped to the reception desk too.
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