Let's Get Practical

...about the brand identity design process so that you actually get something useful out of this.

Dear reader,

It’s been a while, how are you doing this July?

Me? Oh I’ve just spent two weeks at a home exchange in Berlin, ten days on the Calabrian coast, and a few weeks back to work with new energy and lots of conversations with creative entrepreneurs and coaches about their brand identities! On a personal note, I feel like I have found my groove in my creative career, leaning into talking about identity with people all day and helping others connect the dots between their vision, audience, channels, visuals, all that juicy and great stuff that makes up the road from idea to reality.

And that’s the thought I want to write about in this newsletter: the road from idea to reality.

I believe the way I create content and communication is about to change – and bear with me as I find my footing – because I’ve realized I’ve been doing the exact things I find annoying about other people’s content: I’ve been posting platitudes and I’ve been overly minimalistic in order to prove that people should hire me to get the full picture. That feels wrong, because I genuinely want to put helpful stuff out there. My solution to this is to talk to people about the work I really do in order to translate concepts (ideas) into visuals and visual systems (reality).

I really recommend not thinking of yourself as a brand or a business, because you are not a commodity

Let’s say we’re about to work on your brand identity together. I could say all these beautiful things about how you need to know who you’re talking to, what your niche is, and what your vision and mission are, but it quickly gets into “trade talk” and I’m not sure me babbling about high-level stuff like that is really going to help you. And while TODAY, I won’t have the chance to get into the What Does It Mean for all these different steps in the brand identity design process, I can get started.

Here’s where you start in any brand identity design process

…and first of all: “brand identity” can be applied to an entire company, but it can also be applied to an event, a podcast, a zine, so please interpret this term broadly!

Step one is to get truly honest and clear about your brand, and I will tell you how to do that. If you throw yourself into a new venture without planning, it might really work, but you also might have to work extra hard to maintain your business, because you’ll be inventing and re-inventing how you show up in the world constantly. Kind of like when you start a sentence without knowing what you’re really going to say. But, if you consider your identity at the beginning, you’ll free up a lot of time later since you won’t have to re-write your copy a million times, search for the right image for two hours, or worry about what color backdrop to choose for your inspirational quote post on instagram. You will have enough of a direction that you can simply do things.

So how do you get truly honest and clear? Trendy yet tired as it may feel, the classic “Start With Why” TED Talk by Simon Sinek is a great place to begin. Too Long; Didn’t Watch: he suggest working out a so called Golden Circle, meaning Why you’re doing what you’re doing, How you’re doing it, and What exactly you’re doing. You can read about it in detail here if you, like me, are more of a reader than a video watcher. In any case, please do yourself the favor of creating a short statement about why your brand exists, because that will affect every choice you make in the brand identity design process.

I find that it also helps if you start thinking about your own brand as a person. Your brand is not you, but a separate person who might be near identical to yourself. From personal experience, I really recommend not thinking of yourself as a brand or a business, because you are not a commodity, you are a human. It can be easier to describe a person instead of the fluffy concept of “business entity with a vibe,” and it immediately gives you a way to imagine how that person behaves, how they speak, what they wear (aka brand visuals), who they really are.

It’s also more fun to talk about people than brands!

Listen, I don’t want to overwhelm just because I want to go deeper than the all too common “scroll through this post on Instagram that’ll make you feel stupid and like you’ve fallen behind, you silly dumb-dumb.” I will share more in-depth steps to take in this process both in this newsletter, on Instagram, on LinkedIn, in conversations, and I really want to hear from you about what’s helpful and what’s confusing – I will clarify anything you find hard to grasp among my many words!

I’ll leave you with this. Brand identity design is so much more than making things look good. It takes complex concepts and makes them tangible, visible, and infuses them with personality we can feel and react to. Or like my client Mariann Nagatsu so nicely put it: it takes naked ideas and puts clothes on them!

Until next time, take care.

Love,

Anders

studiootherwise.com | shop.studiootherwise.com | instagram.com/studiootherwise