A New Idea for Monthly Brand

I do not nor­mal­ly mix work and plea­sure. That’s a bit of an iron­ic state­ment com­ing from some­one who did not have enough brand­ing to do so he built an entire blog…to do more brand­ing. Month­ly Brand is now half a year old and it has kicked my pos­te­ri­or. In a lot of ways I’ve bit­ten off more than I can chew. But in some respects, I’ve allowed the projects to be more mon­u­men­tal than they maybe need to be.

I’m an invest­ed per­son, I feel. I want to eat and breathe a project, and I often need my sat­is­fac­tion and sense of suc­cess to be mea­sured by invest­ment. There’s real­ly noth­ing wrong with being immer­sive and ded­i­cat­ed, but those qual­i­ties must be tem­pered with prac­ti­cal­i­ty and dili­gence. Fun­da­men­tal­ly, Month­ly Brand isn’t so far off base in terms of attain­able goals; shouldn’t a rea­son­ably small and young com­pa­ny expect to have a logo and brand iden­ti­ty pro­duced in the course of one month? Hell, you can have logos designed for you in two hours on the inter­net. Cer­tain­ly there’s more than a fine line between slap­ping a graph­ic on your pow­er point by COB today and devel­op­ing a rich, depend­able, time­less brand iden­ti­ty. So some­where in between has got to be a method for suc­cess­ful design over the course of four weeks. It’s cer­tain­ly possible…if all out­side fac­tors remain sta­ble that is.

It’s dif­fi­cult to keep a boat on track. There are many pos­si­ble derail­ments, and I hap­pen to know Mur­phy well enough to know that those derail­ments will hap­pen no mat­ter how hard you try to avoid them. The good news is that there are solu­tions. Ways to get back on track with­out sac­ri­fic­ing too much. In the six months that I’ve been doing Month­ly Brand I’m hap­py there haven’t been too many set­backs. One in par­tic­u­lar was not ade­quate­ly antic­i­pat­ing how much the win­ter hol­i­days would eat into my process. I’ve nev­er worked on a sub­scrip­tion tar­get like this, a project that claims to occur at a cer­tain time, every time. Now I feel ter­ri­ble for jour­nal­ists. The hol­i­days backed up my sched­ule and instead of work­ing on clients one at a time, I chose to attempt han­dling more than one at a time in the hopes of catch­ing up. That took longer than I had hoped, but final­ly there is a light at the end of the tun­nel.

But I’m not out of the woods yet, and that’s why for this month I am going to bend my guide­lines a bit in order to help get back to a lev­el play­ing ground. I did learn some things in the past few months, strug­gling with mul­ti­ple brands at a time, but I great­ly enjoyed the time I could invest, the earnest deep div­ing into the idea of a new client that I orig­i­nal­ly pro­posed. As I come close to the end of the cur­rent client, Rein­hardt, I’m going to, once again, make sure that I’ve begun the next, though this time I’ll be tak­ing on a client that is real. The real client is some­one I’ve wished to work with for some time now, but have found my time strapped. After she agreed to go “pub­lic” (in as much as this blog is pub­lic), I felt this might actu­al­ly be an inter­est­ing experiment—to reveal the design process with a bit more real­ism.

But I’m cheat­ing a lit­tle. I know this client well now, and we are friends. There is no pay­ment for the project as I agreed to work pro bono, and I’ve even already some­what begun to devel­op her brand. But that is why I am mix­ing this “work” with “plea­sure,” so that I have a bit of a head start to get back to the orig­i­nal track of Month­ly Brand. I real­ize how­ev­er, that there may be sev­er­al chal­lenges that I am not antic­i­pat­ing (MURPHY). We’re just going to have to wait and see on that. Fun right? But truth­ful­ly, I hope this does offer some expe­ri­ence, some relief on the blog, some ope­ness to the process, and that we still come away with rel­e­vant and attrac­tive design work. That is, after all, the goal of Month­ly Brand.