← Visual Information

Case Study

Four Owners, One Storm

Every visual piece in my portfolio was in a brand I own: 20 Below’s or my studio’s. Much of visual information work is the opposite: someone else’s standard, someone else’s voice, and facts that have to come through unchanged. So I set a brief to show that directly. Take the same examples and reinterpret them in every style.

Role
Brief, choice of standards, review and approval at each stage, publishing.
Team
Me, with an AI-assisted workflow for the page designs, drafting, source checks and rendering.
Timeline
October 2026.
Result
Twelve letter-size sheets: three pieces, each in four brand standards, published on the Visual Information page.

The Brief

The test only works if the content holds still. If each version told a different story, the differences could come from the content instead of the brand. So the facts were locked first. One topic, hurricane-season preparedness, is something a federal agency, a company, a film production and a clinic on the Gulf Coast would all publish. It’s drawn as three common kinds of piece: a data chart, a process timeline and a checklist.

Every fact comes from a public source and was checked against it: the wind ranges and damage wording from the National Hurricane Center, the watch and warning timing from weather.gov, and the emergency kit from Ready.gov. What’s allowed to change is the type, the color, the structure, the voice, and who does what at each stage.

Two panels. Fixed in every version: the six wind-speed ranges and NHC damage wording; watch about 48 hours and warning about 36 hours before tropical-storm-force winds; Ready.gov’s basic kit; the three pieces. Changes with the owner: typeface, palette and corners; page structure; voice; who does what, and one kit group for that reader.
The facts were locked before any layout was drawn.

Four Standards

I picked four owners that pull in different directions. The federal agency uses the U.S. Web Design System, the public-domain standard for federal sites. The company uses IBM’s Carbon Design System. The film production is my own studio, Savage Light Studios. The community clinic uses a plain-language health style set in Atkinson Hyperlegible, a typeface designed for low-vision readers. The agency, the company and the clinic are fictional. That way no real organization’s identity is borrowed, and none of the sheets carries a real seal or the official government-website banner.

Each standard was set down as a handful of tokens: a typeface, a palette, a corner radius, a voice and one signature component. Every sheet for that owner was built from the same set.

Four brand cards. Federal: Public Sans, a USWDS blue ramp, square corners, a plain public voice, and a navy banner with alerts and a numbered process list. Corporate: IBM Plex Sans light, Carbon blues, square corners, an operational voice, and gray tiles with a progress indicator. Film: Montserrat caps and Roboto, a cyan ramp on charcoal, 6 px corners, crew shorthand, and a stripboard. Clinic: Atkinson Hyperlegible, a teal ramp on cream, 14 px corners, a patient voice, and large step cards.
Each owner’s type, palette, corners, voice and signature component.

The Chart

The wind scale is a set of ranges, so each category is a floating bar on one speed axis, with the range written out beside it (“74 to 95 mph”). The bars step through each brand’s own color ramp from light to dark. Every step was computed against that brand’s page color, and the lightest one still clears 3:1, the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) minimum for graphics. Because the range is always written beside the bar, nothing depends on reading the color.

A table of contrast ratios. For each of the four brands, six swatches from tropical storm to Category 5 on that brand’s page color, each with its ratio. The lowest is 3.12 to 1 for the clinic’s Category 1 and the highest is 15.08 to 1 for the corporate Category 5.
Every bar color against its own page.

The layout took three tries. The first used a speed axis starting at zero, so the bars were tiny and the gridlines ran through the damage wording. The second moved the wording into a left column, but long lines ran into the plot. The third put the label and wording on one line with the range on the right, and gave each category a full-width track beneath it. That’s the version all four brands use.

Three wireframes of the chart layout. First: an axis from 0 to 180 mph with tiny bars and wording crossed by gridlines. Second: an axis from 30 mph with wording in a narrow left column that runs into the plot. Third, kept: label and wording on one line, range at the right, and a full-width track below with gridlines only on the track.
Three layouts, each rendered and looked at before the next.

The Timeline

The four stages are identical in every version: the season opens, a hurricane watch, a hurricane warning, an evacuation order. The structure changes with the reader. The public gets a numbered process list, read top to bottom. Site leads get progress tiles across the stages and a list of who owns what. A film crew gets a stripboard, because that’s how a crew already reads a production. Patients get four large step cards in plain words, such as “the storm could come in about 2 days.”

The top of each timeline sheet: the federal numbered process list, the corporate progress tiles with an owners list, the film stripboard with the evacuation strip in ember, and the clinic’s four numbered step cards.
The same stages in four structures.

The Checklist

Ready.gov’s basic kit appears in every version, in the same four groups. Each owner adds one group for its own reader: pets and family for the public, remote work for employees, the production’s contact list, drive backups and insurance papers for a crew, and medicines and medical devices for patients. The clinic puts its group first.

A matrix. Four shared kit groups, water and food, light and news, safety and health, and papers and tools, appear in all four brands. The last row shows each brand’s own group: Don’t forget for the federal agency, For remote operations for the company, For the production for the film crew, and For your health for the clinic.
The shared kit, and each reader’s own group.

Checking the Result

Every sheet was rendered at letter size and looked at as a set of four before I saw it for approval. Most problems only showed up that way. A style meant for the stage tiles leaked into a page intro. Bullets disappeared on a dark strip. White text was too faint on a light strip. A tile sat alone beside an empty slot. Checkboxes rendered as circles. Each was fixed and the set re-rendered before moving on. The portfolio page itself was checked again once it was live.

A table of seven problems found by inspecting the rendered sheets and the live page, each with its fix, from a style leak on the corporate timeline to round checkboxes on the clinic kit.
What looking at the rendered sheets caught.

Outcome

The twelve sheets are on the Visual Information page, under “One Message, Four Brand Standards,” with each piece’s four versions in one row so they can be compared directly. The same facts read as a federal fact sheet, an operations page, a crew document and a patient handout. Nothing in the content changed to get there.

Credits

Brief, choice of standards, review and approvalMe
Package Deliverables: topic, page designs, drafting, source and contrast checks, rendering and review fixesClaude (AI assistant), checked by me
FactsNational Hurricane Center, weather.gov and Ready.gov
Design systemsU.S. Web Design System (public domain) and IBM Carbon Design System (open source); fonts from Google Fonts