Inland is a REIT, a Real Estate Investment Trust that specializes in Commercial and Retail Properties. To protect them from liability each REIT was its own company with it’s own CEO, 22 in all. Each CEO designed their own website, and the result was branding chaos. It was so bad that one of the CEO’s would be posting Dilbert cartoons on the homepage each day, exposing them to copyright infringement.

The parent corporation wanted to impose some structure and discipline on Inland branding, but the individual CEOs were resistant to cede control of their pages.

The first thing we did was some stakeholder interviews to understand what their concerns were. Next we did a series of brand expression workshops to come to consensus of branding elements like colors, imagery and typography.

Then we created a system we called “Freedom Within a Framework.” We created a Master Template, with variations that were consistent with the brand. Finally we created a brand playbook and policy manual outlining in clear terms what content was allowed, its tone and how to present it. We then created self-commented HTML code so devs could see how the site was supposed to look and the code itself could be cut up and integrated into each REIT’s CMS.

The main homepage with a REIT Solution Finder to help users quickly navigate to the right brand.