Good design comes from knowing when to do something daring and when to practice restraint. If a design element doesn't solve a problem, signal meaning, or serve a purpose, it's likely superfluous.

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After serving as a clinical research coordinator across multiple projects at numerous satellite sites and all three main campuses of the University of California, San Francisco, I joined the EngageUC team piloting a new simplified consent form for biobanking to replace the longer form then-in-use throughout the university system statewide. I was a research assistant. However, aware of my design work on the U-Find-Out and Vaccination Is Prevention studies, EngageUC's study team asked if I could create something that would help our project stand out in presentations, as other EngageUC sites across the UC system had done.

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My only constraints were UCSF’s brand guidelines. The solution was straightforward: an orange rectangle highlighting white text, matched to the height of the Clinical and Translational Science Institutes Venn diagram logomark. The result is a clean identifier that catches the eye while seamlessly slotting in to institutional visual standards. UCSF's guidelines specify Helvetica Neue 45 Light as the default weight, so the EngageUC wordmark uses Helvetica Neue 55 Roman- itself a mildly subversive decision when others might choose 65 Medium or 75 Bold.

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The taped UI containers on this page? A gentle nod to the community engagement workshop that enabled this paper.

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Design is tension. 
Great designers calibrate accordingly.