Making people read the thing nobody reads

The audience cannot leave, which makes it harder

Internal communications has a captive audience and no attention. Nobody unsubscribes from a compliance digest; they just do not open it. The measure of the work is not reach, it is whether a colleague reaches the end of the page.

Across a year of it the system settled into two registers. Security and product work runs dark, technical and high-contrast. Compliance and policy work runs illustrated and conversational, because the content is already forbidding and the design should not add to it.

Register one — dark and technical

Cybersecurity Month, the innovation lab, and product demo days. Neon on near-black, isometric and dimensional, closer to a product launch than an internal memo — which is the point, because these are the pieces competing with actual product marketing for the same fifteen seconds.

Register two — illustrated and conversational

The December gift-declaration digest is the piece I would defend hardest. It is a regulatory notice about accepting corporate gifts, and it is written as a two-character comic in Nigerian pidgin — “Omo, December is about to be Detty.” A policy document nobody would have finished became one people quoted back.

The October edition takes the same permission in a different direction: four compliance myths, each answered, each given its own illustrated panel, on a light blue field chosen specifically because it looks nothing like a policy PDF.