Brand Building in The Modern World

Last month, we took The Modern World brand workshop and hit the road, sharing it with a bunch of Real5 Warrington and Liverpool members that wanted to know a bit more about A) What we do? B) What branding is? and C) If I was actually a real person, not a stock image.

For us, they were both really good mornings to get out and about, answering some design questions, talking shop with some lovely folks and blowing our own trumpets a little bit too.

As designers, it’s really easy to get wrapped up in our own little world of shiny new fonts, figuring out how to describe yourself without saying “Award-winning creative agency” (Like this, maybe?), and just generally trying not to be replaced by AI.

But, when you step outside that bubble and back into the real world, a worryingly large amount of people's experience of branding is typically a mix of:

– Stock, Fiverr, “I’ll design a logo for less than a Big Mac”

– That task on The Apprentice

– Clickbait articles like ‘Customers baffled by new ￡100m logo that could’ve been done in Word’

That can sometimes leave us with a fair old gap to bridge between expectation and reality.

Talking about our processes and letting people take a peep behind the curtain may not be the done thing in the design industry (don’t say the dee-eye-ess-ar-you-pee-tee word), but why not? It all seems a bit like cutting off your nose to spite your face to us.

While taking our workshops out into the big-wide-world isn’t a huge deal in the grand scheme of things, we’re a little way off educating the nation just yet, it’s a step in the right direction that we see as taking away some of the mystery, to reveal a little bit of mastery ??.

(PS. Yes, this probably could’ve been one of those posts that you click “…see more” and then War and Peace appears, but who wants that?)