Volume 149: Where Next Brand Design?

Where Next Brand Design?

tl;dr: Swimming in warmer commercial currents again.

We’re at an inflection point in the business of branding design. The go-go good times from 2010 to 2022 lifted all boats, masking the fact that we were headed in a perilous direction.

Some called this period blanding rather than branding, but while that’s a neat rhetorical quip, it fails to address the commercial danger inherent in the slide toward bland, sterile, minimal modernism that’s now all around us, especially in the digital environment.

The commercial value of any brand identity – which I’ll use as shorthand for logo, design system, colors, imagery, secondary graphics, etc. – is primarily exhibited via its distinctiveness. In simple terms, how uniquely identifiable a brand is relative to every other brand. This distinctiveness comes in many forms: For Coke, it’s the bottle shape, the red color, and the cursive logotype. For T-Mobile, it’s magenta. For Nike, it’s the swoosh. For McDonald’s, the golden arches and that creepy f’ing clown. You get the idea. 

The memory structures built by repeated exposure to these unique and legally protectable brand assets are what make a brand identity commercially valuable. 

Yet, this is a task at which branding is failing.

Over a six-year period from 2014 to 2020, US trademark filings more than doubled. From just over 300,000 to around 650,000. Allied to this doubling in trademarks, audiences, and marketing channels continued to fragment. Combine an environment that is now more than twice as competitive with a continuing fragmentation of audiences and channels, and it becomes radically more challenging for a brand to be noticed, let alone achieve success. Some have dubbed this phenomenon the “attention economy,” within which capturing attention has become the new currency.

With this as the backdrop, you’d be forgiven for thinking the branding industry would rise to the moment. To see it as an opportunity to deliver stand-out brand identities that move the needle commercially.

Yet, not only did this not happen, we arguably moved the entire industry backward instead. A recent study sponsored by JKR posits that a mere 15% of brand assets are distinctive. This means the vast majority of everything we’ve designed is commodified, non-differentiating, and does little or nothing to deliver the primary job a brand identity is supposed to fulfill.

Put another way, it’s not utterly ridiculous (only a little bit) to suggest that 85% of brand design has little or no commercial value. An untenable reality for any business, in any category, if it wishes to stay in business. 

This is a particularly important observation right now as the design hype bubble of the past twelve years bursts amid a crucible of rising interest rates, constrained client budgets, VC and tech tumbleweeds, and the new threat of AI-driven automation on our doorstep. 

So, what happened? And how do we ensure a successful emergence, like a phoenix from the ashes, of this particular period?

There are likely many reasons for where we find ourselves, but one of the most obvious is that as design became more commercially popular, we began falsely equating good design with good branding. As design shifted from a niche skill to a necessary capability, the level of craft became more important than how well the identity made the brand stand out.

The problem is that no matter how well-crafted an identity, it’s irrelevant if it doesn’t deliver on its most basic requirement. Yet, spend any amount of time in the comments section of any well-known design blog, and you’ll see little conversation about how distinctive and unique a solution is and much focused on the nuances of its craft. In fact, the further removed any identity is from an extremely narrow bound of what might be deemed “acceptable,” the more likely it is to be shot down rather than celebrated. 

This needs to change for multiple reasons, not least of which is that craft is the least valuable aspect of great brand design and the one that’s under the greatest threat of commoditization through AI-driven automation.

Allow me, for a second, as a non-designer, to lay out the three core attributes that I believe are shared by the best brand designers I’ve worked with over a twenty-plus-year career.

Ideas. 
The best brand designers think in ideas. Specifically, conceptual ideas that connect to the strategy and drive the identity in unique directions. These are not ideas for the sake of it; they’re ideas that move the brand forward in surprisingly fresh ways.  

Taste. 
Taste is the umami of branding. We know it when we experience it, but it’s almost impossible to define in words. Of all the elements of design, I feel taste is the least trainable, which is why so much brand design is so derivative. You either have taste or you don't, and those who don’t copy.

Craft.
While this may be a controversial perspective, I view craft as the least valuable and most table-stakes quality in a great brand designer. You need enough to be functional, but diminishing returns kick in quickly, and designers with a high bar for craft but limited abilities with ideas and no real sense of taste rarely do great work. Neat and tidy? Absolutely. Great? Rarely.

Of these three elements, it’s very difficult to train a machine to have superior taste or superior ideas. Yet, craft is eminently trainable. Taste and ideas have neither rules nor limits, yet craft is driven by the rules and principles that are taught to designers. And if rules and principles can be taught to a person, they can just as easily be taught to a machine. 

If I sum up what led us to where we are, my diagnosis is that as more designers entered more corporations, design became an insular professional culture that elevated craft above all else. As a result, we quickly lost sight of the commercial imperative to create innovative, different, and distinctive identities. We stopped having new and fresh ideas, stopped pushing the edges of what is possible, and stopped applying taste in ways that make brands stand out across a more challenging, fragmented, complex, and competitive array of online and offline channels. 

And, while we may have observed this phenomenon academically at the time, the rising tide of design was busy lifting all boats, which meant there was little or no commercial penalty for delivering bland, derivative, sterile work. In fact, for many clients, the clarity of knowing exactly what they were getting -modernity- became something of a comfort blanket, especially if their reality was defined by chaos (startups) or complexity (large organizations).

But the tide doesn’t rise forever. And, as Warren Buffet once famously said: “Only when the tide goes out do you learn who has been swimming naked.” And today, the tide very much appears to be on the way out. 

So, what will it take for us to begin swimming in warmer commercial currents again?

First, we must recognize that conformity, no matter how well crafted, is not our job. Difference is. To deliver that, we must embed new processes that seek to understand category, and broader design tropes, with the express goal of avoiding them rather than fitting in with them. 

Second, we must do a better job of educating ourselves and our clients on what makes for a successful brand identity, re-focusing on the paramount importance of creating unique, distinctive, and differentiated brand assets with which they can more effectively fight the battle for attention. 

Finally, we must rethink our own priorities as we consider what makes for great work and be brave enough to elevate novel conceptual ideas and non-obvious expressions of taste while simultaneously moving beyond our dogmatic obsession with craft. 

For, while the challenges of the moment are obvious, so is the opportunity. If only 15% of all brand assets are currently distinctive, the opportunity is to make a meaningful dent in the remaining 85%.

This isn’t just an opportunity; it’s a generational one. An opportunity for the next generation of branding professionals to supersede what came before. To play with new ideas, to explore fertile new aesthetic territory. To use the tools of automation to augment their work. And to make it their mission to forge a new path that’s unique to the challenges of the 21st century rather than continuing to be stuck plumbing the existential depths of the 20th.

Those who take this to heart will make their mark as we move forward, while those who do not will fall by the wayside. Reduced to a mere footnote in the history of our field.