Our six principles are our creative compass

At HSBC, our creative direction is a set of six principles that guide us in everything we produce: they keep us consistent, no matter what we’re creating.

By referring to the right principle at the right time, these elements come together to craft our brand and make it stick in our audience’s minds. They give us the freedom to create beautiful assets, within the guardrails of a sturdy structure.

Before we talk more about our own creative direction, let’s explore its benefits for every business.

Why organisations need a creative direction

Having a clear creative direction makes organisations distinctive, while making sure their brand is still recognisable to customers and colleagues.

But this is about more than individual ‘branded’ elements. While an organisation will have its own logo, colour palette and fonts, those assets on their own don’t make up a creative direction.

Instead, it’s when every element of your branding aligns – from your typography to your imagery to your tone of voice – underneath a set of guiding principles. That’s when your customers can pick you out.

It’s this level of consistency that builds trust among customers, who want the brands they interact with to be reliable.

Flexibility within a framework

The benefits don’t end there: a creative direction helps the people inside the organisation, too. Because having a structure in place for colleagues actually boosts their creativity. 

Think about it like this: when you’re looking at a blank page, it can be hard to know where to start. But a creative direction can answer a lot of your basic questions, so you can focus on the message, the idea the big picture of whatever it is you want to produce. That structure often leads to a more creative outcome. 

A well-thought-out creative direction should give people enough flexibility within a framework for their ideas to flourish – and that’s exactly what we do at HSBC.

Clearer direction upfront means less governance later

Here’s another benefit you might not have thought of: a clear creative direction gives everyone who works at your organisation – and anyone new who joins it – a shortcut to understanding your brand.

Once you’ve set out how to use the framework upfront, that means less governance for your design team later. It means your people can create things more quickly, by drawing on your universal creative principles to guide them. 

Get it right at the start, and you’ll save everyone time. More than that: you’ll help your people enjoy producing on-brand content, every time. Imagine the space that frees up, company-wide.

HSBC’s creative direction: a careful equation

There are six principles that make up our creative direction at HSBC: angular, tactically red, clearly understood, internationally relatable, logical and creatively considered. You can find out more about them in the video above.   

It’s the interaction between our foundations – our photography, our illustrations and our typography, to name a few – and the application of these six principles that brings our creative direction to life. And it’s this equation that makes us distinctive and noticeable to our customers, wherever they experience us.

Let’s take our ‘tactically red’ principle as an example. Many brands have red colour palettes, or use red in their illustrations. But it’s the way we use red – not overtly and only at certain points in the user journey – that makes us recognisable as HSBC.

The Create Design System

At HSBC, we use our principles everywhere: from apps to airports. It’s not just digital – our direction is at the heart of ad campaigns and billboards and everything else we create. 

That means there are over 100,000 people using our Create Design System across 60 markets in the world. So it’s crucial for us to have a framework to help our global design community stay consistent.

With our six principles, plus the flexibility for people to create something great themselves, we can stay on-brand and distinctive every time.