Branding for all: what designing for neurodivergent audiences taught me about every audience

← All insights

I have a Certificate in Education with a focus on autism studies. I’ve spent nearly two decades building brand systems at enterprise scale. Those two things shouldn’t intersect as naturally as they do.

But when I started building Together Better Books — a personalised children’s publishing platform for neurodivergent kids, which I hope to launch later this year — I realised the principles I was applying to make stories emotionally safe for sensitive children were the same principles that would have solved half the brand system failures I’d seen in enterprise.

The overlap comes down to this: neurodivergent audiences need clarity, consistency, and predictability. So does everyone else. Neurodivergent users just surface the failures faster.

Neuro-affirming design starts from the position that neurological differences are natural variations, not deficits. It doesn’t mean dumbing things down. It means removing the unnecessary cognitive load that makes systems harder to use than they need to be.

For Together Better Books, that meant thinking carefully about visual predictability — consistent illustration styles, reliable layouts, characters that behave the way a child expects them to. It meant colour choices that don’t overwhelm. Typography that’s readable. Narrative structures that signal clearly where they’re going so a child can relax into the story instead of bracing for surprises.

Every one of those decisions made the books better for all children. The neurodivergent-first approach didn’t narrow the audience. It widened it.

Enterprise brand systems fail for the same reasons that poorly designed experiences fail neurodivergent users: inconsistency, cognitive overload, and unclear expectations.

A 200-page brand guideline that requires someone to hold multiple conflicting rules in their head while making design decisions is a cognitive load problem. A template system where the same element looks different across platforms is a predictability problem. A brand voice guide that describes tone with abstract adjectives instead of concrete examples is a clarity problem.

When I design brand systems now, I think about them the way I think about neuro-affirming design. Will someone with no prior context be able to use this system correctly the first time? If the answer is no, the system is the problem.

Token-based design systems solve this elegantly. A designer doesn’t need to remember that the primary blue is #340189. The token carries the decision. A non-designer using a locked template doesn’t need to understand spacing rules. The template enforces them. The cognitive load drops to near zero, and the outputs are consistent by default. That’s why designing simple content in Claude can be so empowering, especially as me myself with ADHD can attest to — I appreciate that Claude holds that context and leaves me room to think and be creative with ideas.

This connects to employer brand in a way most organisations haven’t considered. Neurodivergent candidates — autistic, ADHD, dyslexic, dyspraxic — represent an enormous talent pool that most hiring processes actively exclude, often unintentionally.

The exclusion starts with the brand experience. A career site that’s visually chaotic, uses vague language about culture, buries practical information, and requires navigating inconsistent interfaces is a barrier for neurodivergent candidates before they even reach the application form. An interview process with unclear expectations, ambiguous instructions, and shifting formats is another barrier.

These are brand problems. A coherent, predictable, clearly structured employer brand experience — where every touchpoint behaves the way the previous one suggested it would — is inherently more accessible to neurodivergent candidates. And, again, it’s better for everyone.

The organisations that build genuinely inclusive brand experiences won’t just attract neurodivergent talent. They’ll attract people who value clarity, consistency, and respect. That’s a competitive advantage disguised as an accessibility initiative.

The best brand systems I’ve built share a quality with the best neuro-affirming design: they reduce the distance between intent and understanding. They don’t ask the user to interpret. They don’t ask the user to guess. They make the right choice the easy choice.

Designing for the edges — for the users who need the most clarity, the most consistency, the most predictability — produces systems that work better for the centre too. That’s true in children’s publishing. It’s true in enterprise brand systems. It’s true in employer brand.

If your brand system requires someone to read 200 pages before they can use it correctly, it’s failing the same way a poorly designed classroom fails a neurodivergent student. The system should carry the intelligence, so the user can focus on the work.