The thinking before the making.

Ask me what I do and I’ll probably say brand strategy and identity design. My wife will say, “Logos and websites.” People tend to understand her answer immediately. Mine usually needs another conversation.

She’s not wrong. You do get the logo and the website. I just care rather a lot about what goes into them.

Understanding the business

For me, brand identity starts with identity. Before we decide what a business should look like, we need to understand who it is. Where it came from, what it does well, what it doesn’t, the people behind it and the people it does its best work for. The history matters. So do the ambitions, the uncomfortable bits and the things that have been learnt the hard way.

That applies whether the business is one person or a much larger organisation. We are not simply taking the founder’s personality and making it the company logo. We are understanding the business as a whole and what it needs to express.

I’ve said before that the most powerful person in the room is someone who knows themselves. I think the same principle is useful in branding. When you understand what you stand for, where you belong and where you’re going, you have something to make decisions against. You don’t have to keep borrowing somebody else’s personality because theirs happens to look successful.

That is what I mean by identity, clarity and purpose. Not three impressive words for the presentation. A useful understanding of the business you are building.

Our full branding engagement starts with a discovery conversation. We allow up to three hours, but the point is not to keep everyone occupied until the time runs out. There are things I need to understand, and I listen for the questions inside the answers.

Someone says something almost in passing. It doesn’t quite fit with what they said earlier. Or they describe something valuable as though every business does it. I’ll go back to that. Sometimes we need to follow it for a while before we understand why it matters.

The important result is not just that I leave with a better brief. It is that you leave with a clearer understanding of your own business. Sometimes we uncover a different direction. Sometimes we put words and reasons around something you already knew. I don’t need to turn your world upside down to prove the session was useful.

There can be a real change in the energy of that conversation. Something that felt muddled becomes clear. An ambition starts to feel like a direction rather than a vague idea you keep putting off. You can explain it. You can stand behind it.

Then we have to make it visible.

Turning understanding into design

I take that understanding back to the team. Often I can already see a direction in my mind, but telling the story is not the same as designing it. The team brings its own judgement and craft to turning that understanding into something you can actually see and use. That part matters enormously to me. Good thinking does not excuse mediocre design.

The identity should feel like the suit the business wears into the room it wants to be in. It needs to fit, rather than make you look like you have borrowed someone else’s clothes. And it needs to make sense to the people in that room. You recognising yourself in the work is important. The right audience understanding what you offer is just as important.

I sometimes tell clients we give birth to the concept together. Slightly corny? Yes. But the understanding belongs to both of us. That is different from asking you to become the designer. You bring the knowledge, we bring the creative judgement, and we develop the direction together.

There is a lovely anticipation before that first presentation. We have talked through something that now feels clear, but you haven’t seen what it looks like yet. It is exciting for you and a little nerve-racking for us. We are about to show you our interpretation of something that matters to you.

I explain that it is the first concept, then I stop talking and take you through it. Slide by slide. There is time to discuss the decisions afterwards. First, I want you to experience the work.

The response I love is not just, “That’s a nice logo.” It is, “I see it. That’s us.” Sometimes there is a silence before it. I find that moment enormously rewarding because the understanding has made it through into the design.

There may still be changes. A colour, a typeface, a treatment that needs another look. We work through those. But we have a shared direction to develop rather than a fresh guessing game every time someone suggests a revision.

What you leave with

Then it becomes the finished identity, the website, the guidelines and the agreed materials. The conversation has to survive contact with the actual work. It should still make sense when somebody reads your homepage, sees your presentation or comes across the business for the first time.

So yes, logos and websites. My wife’s version is still considerably quicker.

Mine is that you should leave knowing who the business is, with work that expresses it properly and the tools to put it in front of the right people. The thinking and the making belong together.