You’re hiring a designer or marketing person and can’t wait for the process to unfold.
Or…maybe not.
Most likely you have some uncertainty. You don’t know how to choose a consultant. You’ve never been through the process. You don’t know which questions to ask. You don’t speak the same language. You’re worried about money. You have a committee to please. You’ve got your other work to do.
Oof. Read more
In the visual chaos of bookstores, my eye always settles on the logic and order of families of titles — collections, put out by a publisher, with a common visual system, a sort-of brand within a brand.
There’s a pleasing harmony to these single- or multi-author collections. And the viewer goes back and forth between the books’ unifying elements and their unique imagery. You’re able to pay more attention to the books’ art because of the common visual thread running across the individual titles.
The word brand and its counterparts, the mind-boggling (and snooty-sounding) array of words like brand architecture, brand extension, vertical branding, diagonal branding (okay, I made that last one up) are enough to make you not want to bother.
This leads small business people to think branding is only for the Martha Stewarts and Budweisers of the world. But as overused as the word brand is, it’s the only word we have to describe the totality of what a company represents to the outside world. Read more
(Download the white paper for The Tree of So-So? Or the Forest of Effective.)
Few businesses these days can afford to throw dollars at any communications unless they see some value—value being the relationship between cost paid and results achieved. Nonprofits especially can’t afford to, with budgets and staff strained as they are. Why then do so many organizations approach projects in ways that hinder their ability to be as effective as they could be?
