Studio Missive 34: Your brand is not your logo
Hi friends,
Happy Friday! Here’s what’s happening at the studio this week.
What’s inspiring you?
- Why are so many control rooms seafoam green? I can’t believe I’m saying this, but don’t skip the comments on this one. Some interesting additional insights and links there too. For example, surgical scrubs are green too.
- Some interesting typefaces this week. I love Ratch, which has stylistic alternates that would be really useful for word marks. Matthijs Herzberg is drawing a font every couple days and sharing it on his Mastodon account. I loved this one in particular.
- Like everybody, I am amazed by the photos NASA is getting from the moon. So many of the photos are incredible, but this shot of the moon eclipsing the sun took my breath away. I also love this photo of the moon with the earth beyond it. A sort of reverse perspective, if you will. A lot of folks have shared their own takes on these photos that I enjoyed. Jason Kottke shared some great phone wallpapers. Federico Viticci made a shortcut that rotates through desktop photos from NASA’s Artemis II collection for iOS and macOS. Finally, Petapixel analyzed why the 10 year old Nikon D5 is the best camera for Artemis II.
- Dan Mall organized a summit for agency owners in Belize. He organized multi-hour hot seats, got incredible service, and the whole crew got to experience a place where Francis Ford Coppola went to retreat. I’d love to be a part of something as intense as this.
What are you working on?
This week, I led a lunch and learn of sorts about branding. It’s an introduction to the topic for a group of small business owners. I’m sharing what branding is, along with some exercises they can do to identify what their branding is currently doing. Branding is counterintuitive. A brand isn’t just a logo. If I’m honest, it’s not a logo at all. The logo is a small piece. A brand is how a customer feels about a product, service, or organization. It’s a feeling, not an aesthetic (although they inform one another).
The awkward truth is this: nobody cares about your logo. But they might align with your identity.
Your brand is what your customers decide it is, and since it’s about feelings, every customer might experience a slightly different version of your brand. The brand is a living thing. You can change the visual elements of the brand with the times. But the brand identity should reflect the brand’s personality. They have to match.
A brand identity is a rhetorical device you can use to persuade the public to see your organization as who it is.
Bad branding isn’t about a logo; it’s about a mismatch between customer perception and the reality of an organization. If you get the identity wrong, you can’t fix the brand without throwing it out and restarting.
As simply as possible, if your organization were a person, the brand is their entire self projected aesthetically, so that people immediately identify and recognize themselves in it.
There’s an episode of Netflix’s Abstract: The Art of Design that focuses on graphic designer Paula Scher’s work at Pentagram. (You can watch the whole episode on YouTube.)The episode spends a small portion of its time discussing Paula’s work on The Public Theater. She says something interesting:
I started trying to create a process in the identities I make where I go back and revisit them in five or ten years, because sometimes they need tweaking. It’s hard to make a guess, so you want to design something that can be adapted to its time. I’ve redesigned The Public Theater logo three times and nobody even knows it. I’ve tightened it up, moved it apart, changed the font. I’ve had a love affair with The Public Theatre.
When Paula designed the new identity for The Public, she made it possible for The Public Theater and New York City to find common ground. The Public looked like a New Yorker, talked like a New Yorker, and behaved like a New Yorker. It changed the public’s perception from ​“those artsy theatre people” to ​“one of us.” But it wasn’t because of the logo itself. It was because the logo identified The Public Theater as a New Yorker.
A brand is a way of identifying who you are and who your people are. As Seth Godin says, ​“people like us do things like this.”
You are more than your outfits. Your brand is more than your logo.
Until next week,
Nathan