Studio Missive 35: The word is the logo

Hi friends,

Happy Friday! Here’s what’s happening in the studio this week.

What’s inspiring you?

I’ve spent the week digging deep into brand strategy and type aesthetics.

1. I’ve been studying the design behind some quirky brands. I’ve been looking into this for a client. (More on that in a future week.) There’s Nice (canned wine and fun colours!), Popina (a now-closed restaurant), Apron (payment software), and Mutt (dog food branded as pet wellness). Fun stuff! 
2. That led me down a rabbit hole to Typeeverything, who makes a lot of these quirky typefaces. I really like Crunch, Newsagent, and Champ, but they are all awesome. I downloaded every single trial typeface and tried them all with my own studio name and all my clients’ names. It was a fun way to spend a couple hours.
3. I’ve done a lot of paper reading this week. The Win Without Pitching Manifesto and The Brand Gap are both remarkable, short reads that I can’t recommend highly enough. Both of them should be reread with some frequency, and they are reshaping how I think about the studio. (Up next are The Brand Flip, Zag, and Creative Strategy and the Business of Design.)

What are you working on?

This week, I designed four stylescapes for a client. (I hope I can share them here next week, after the client has seen them.)

I do stylescapes differently from most agencies or designers. Most of them treat stylescapes as art-directed mood boards. It’s other people’s imagery, pictures, and typography placed carefully in a panorama designed to evoke the feeling of a brand.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s hard to envision yourself in a mood board. So I always start with my design references and then make my own takes on them. These are three (or more) design directions that a client will pick their favourite elements from, so even if I’m directly stealing ideas, none of them will make it into the finished product as is. 

This takes a bit more time than a traditional stylescape, but I find the results are meaningfully better. By placing the client’s own brand name into these designs, and using the words they use, they can see themselves in that brand much more easily than they would if they looked at a mood board. It becomes easier to see the future, for them, and note how it all comes back to their brand strategy.

This week, as I assembled these four stylescapes, I remembered the importance of type in logo design. Logo comes from the Greek logos, which literally means ​“word.” Logo and word are one and the same. Therefore, in branding, the word is the logo, and the logo is the word. Your name must be memorable, and the typography of that mark must be memorable with it, because otherwise it will be forgotten.

And just like graphic and web design, it all comes back to typography.

Until next week,

Nathan