A Rant From Your Friendly Neighborhood Control Freak Designer
Let’s say this owner goes to an agency (yay!) and works with them to create a logo, turning their theoretical brand into a real brand. The process is about defining the brand but this owner typically has a hard time separating the brand from themselves, and if they don’t listen to their agency (boo!) they end up with a logo that they themselves love but is unlikely to serve the brand in the short-term, much less for years, expansions, and growth to come.
In most start-up situations, this is the end of “branding” in the client’s mind, but everything they do after that affects the brand. It builds and expands based on how they talk about the brand, how their clients interact with the brand, and how they slap their logo on every surface in their office without considering the clear area specifications their designer specifically put in place for how close other objects can be to the logo without it looking crowded. A brand is so much more than a logo, and as a control freak designer, which most of us are, it’s hard to give a logo to someone without always having the ability to help them implement it.
In the agency world, we (your team on the outside) get invested in your company. We learn about your targets, we memorize your mission statement (and often write it for you), we put ourselves in your shoes, and we attack every marketing, design, and content creating problem equipped with a comprehensive understanding of your brand. Because we’re here to help you build it. We’re invested emotionally, we care (more than is healthy), and we want you to succeed. And success to us looks a lot like staying true to the brand that we made together. For us, this is a partnership. We want to raise our baby together. We want to be there for its first steps. We want to celebrate sales, attend conferences, and yes, evangelize about your brand. But we don’t always get to.
A BRAND, beyond a logo, is made up of the following things: Development, Expression, Expansion, and Authority.
- Brand Development is what you come to the table with (for the most part). Here at General Public, in our kick-off meetings, we typically talk over Who You Are™, what you do, who else does what you do, why you do it, who you do it for, and how you do it differently. Obviously, there’s a lot there, and while you might know all the answers, it usually takes us a good two hours to unpack it all. When we’re done, though, we are all on the same page and can now begin to visually define your brand (or name it as well if need be).
- Brand Expression is, yes, your logo, but it’s also your brand voice, personality, messaging, and all other design elements of your visual identity system. For the most part, we’re all on the same page here. We work with you to establish the brand look, feel, and tone. The egg has hatched, we’re proud new parents, and we’ve got a great plan, we’re going to raise the freaking best baby bird.
- Brand Expansion is everything beyond your visual identity system. It’s how you market to your target audience. Your brochures, your emails, your ads, your tweets, your PR, your general distribution… you see how we, your team, are now starting to fall behind while you barrel ahead with the brand? We made this beautiful baby bird together, but now we have to trust you with it. In this arena, we can find ways to work together to always be on the same page, but there are points where we just have to trust that you can help the brand fly on its own and not plummet from the nest. Here again, if you really trust us, and include us in all of the marketing materials that are being created, we can be confident that our little bird is ready to fly.
- Brand Authority is your company actually making good on the promises we’ve made the marketplace together. As your designer, I’m fully in trust mode here because it all comes down to whether our little bird can talk the talk (squawk the squawk?). Can your company provide the assured value and rise above the competition? We can make it look great, we can make it sound great, and we can get as inside as possible, but the inherent problem with being a control freak designer in an agency world is that we don’t have control at all.
If you’re working with an agency, I cannot stress enough how important it is to communicate with your team. You can’t expect us to know things you haven’t told us and vice versa. We provide as many standards guides and meetings as we can to try and stay on the same page with the brand, but at some point, we all just need to trust each other. That’s what all great partnerships are based on after all. And at the end of the day, we just love seeing our little birds fly.