Chris Davies: Great Communication Starts with the Courage to Say Less
Great Communication Starts with Reduction
Companies have more content than ever before. Products, services, data, audiences and messages continue to grow. The biggest challenge is no longer communicating more. It's deciding what actually matters.
That's exactly where the award-winning Canadian Securities Exchange website stands out. The platform serves investors, listed companies, traders, regulators and international stakeholders all at once. Rather than creating separate messages for every audience, Dog and Pony Studios developed one overarching communication idea that connects them all.
For Chris Davies, that's where great communication design begins.
"A lot of people look at communication design as a place where you're producing, but good communication design is about reducing."
Everything people don't need right away disappears. What's left is communication that resonates both emotionally and intellectually. Because time is the scarcest resource of all. "You get emotionally about 1.5 seconds to connect."
The biggest challenge of the project wasn't the interface or the information architecture; it was the communication itself. The Canadian Securities Exchange speaks to completely different audiences. Creating a separate story for each one would have made the platform fragmented and unnecessarily complex.
Dog and Pony Studios chose a different approach. Instead of starting with the audience, they started with the brand's core idea. The result was the positioning "Always Invested." It's a message that works in different ways for different people. Investors are always investing. Companies invest in growth. The exchange is invested in the success of its listed companies. Traders are invested in making the best decisions.
One simple idea creates relevance for everyone. For Davies, that's exactly what communication design should do. "You have to capture the biggest and most important idea that the brand has to offer."
Stories Beat Personas
Many communication processes begin with personas, audience matrices and detailed demographic analysis. Chris Davies believes that's often where things go wrong.
"If you look at demographic analysis for too long, you end up creating a persona – but that persona isn't a person."
Of course, it's important to understand who you're talking to. But something else matters even more. "Focus less on lists of characteristics and more on telling a real story."
The CSE website is a perfect example of this philosophy in action. Even though it serves a wide range of audiences, the platform feels consistent, intuitive and easy to understand. Not because every audience gets its own message, but because everyone understands the same story.
Financial markets are built on numbers, charts, data and stock prices. At first glance, that doesn't sound like storytelling.Davies sees it differently. Data tells stories too. The role of communication design is to make those stories visible, in a language that each audience instinctively understands. That's why the CSE website succeeds not only through its visual design, but through its ability to organise complex information, create clarity and help people find their way.
What Is the One Idea That Makes Your Brand Unforgettable?
The German Design Awards recognise projects that solve complex challenges through design clarity. The Canadian Securities Exchange website is a powerful example of how outstanding communication design isn't about saying more—it's about making the most important things impossible to miss. It brings together strategy, storytelling and user experience in one digital platform that connects diverse audiences through a single, compelling idea.
If your project offers new answers to the challenges of our time, we look forward to your submission to the German Design Awards 2027.
Take the opportunity to present your work to an international jury and become part of a global network of outstanding design.
