Speaking of reputation
Transcript
I was once referred to a client as a logo designer and creative. Not untrue. But there’s a reason the logo is the easy part for me.
I was sold as a brand guy who wanted to work with cash-strapped startups. Trouble was, the purpose needs to be real if the cash isn’t there.
A colleague from the digital strategy side of my old firm referred me to a medical-tech startup. She was trying to keep a good designer in the industry. I was trying to relaunch my freelance career. They asked for a logo and full brand guidelines.
By then I’d been studying to be a brand architect, ever since I found Pfizer’s 2009 brand guidelines, the ones Siegel+Gale built. Before it shows you a single logo, it tells you who it’s guiding and why. That’s what I thought guidelines were for.
I had principles about how I would work going forward, based in values about value. What am I lending my hands to? It’s the question that took me away from defense contracts. I took the $300 logo job anyway, because my family needed money.
The platform was positioned as the answer for care facilities: basic comforts, afforded by automation, as human resources decline. That makes it a human resource solution. But the marketing made a quality argument, and in medical branding a quality argument is something I would have to build a test for. So I asked how they were measuring the outcomes of patients’ experience with the platform. The problems their marketing cited were real. I wanted to know what our promise was supposed to deliver.
They came prepared: a set of why statements. When I asked who the company was, in character terms, they didn’t want to go there. So the story elements I added to the deck my old firm had built for them were off-character. There was no character yet to be on.
The market positioning was still a hypothesis, built on one community. Everything the logo would end up on was still conceptual.
I tried to engage them in strategy. Every strategic conversation turned into a negotiation over boundaries, and none of them ended with both of us getting what we needed. They thought I was looking for more money. I thought we both knew guidelines were a strategic deliverable, because that’s what they’d asked for. They weren’t paying me to talk to them about strategy. They were paying for creative execution. Unfortunately, brand guidelines are a strategic deliverable, and nobody on their side was doing strategy. I had to bill them more for the deck creative, because we were spending our time recoloring old deliverables before we even knew if they’d be valuable going forward. Then they stopped answering my questions.
I delivered the logo, and a Wix site I spent too long wrestling into shape. The bills were getting higher because I was having to create assets without any strategic direction beyond their individual purpose statements.
They had asked for full brand guidelines from the start. Early on, they asked to see proof I understood the deliverable. Guidelines have to guide someone. I wanted to ask who, and where.
I never delivered the brand guidelines. The project ended before we got to who they were for.
My career taught me my best work is done when I have access to a coherent strategy within which that logo rests. Character first. The logo comes last.
The client and the referring colleague are left unnamed on purpose. Sound uses the voices already on your device; pick the one you like best under Voice.