Brand spanking

If there’s a trick to branding, I don’t know what it is. Nevertheless, my batting average is fairly high.

Listening helps, and it’s good to have some facility with Adobe Illustrator, and some taste, but brand development, for all the talk of focus groups and color theory, is anything but an exact science. It isn’t a science at all. I wouldn’t even call it an art. It’s a calculation, a crap shoot. One part skill, one part puffery, eight parts luck.

Some of my favorite work has been rejected, and some of my spoiler options (the ones I throw in to make the ones I like look better by comparison) have won the day. There’s no making sense of it, no lessons to be learned. Just keep throwing the dice and sooner or later you’ll get lucky or you’ll get lost.

“I love this circular brown one!”

“That’s your coffee ring, sir.”

“I love it!”

“Excellent choice.”