Emily Zugay has proved the power of contrast.

Over my seventeen years working as an artist and designer for businesses there is one fundamental thing I constantly see people get wrong with their brand strategy: the idea that the logo needs to be something out of this cosmos to make their business successful. A founder shouldn’t be focussed on this, but what they want and what they need are two different things. The brand creative needs to first realise that logo design means nothing if your brand doesn’t have soul. You can have the most perfectly designed logo in the market, but if your brand doesn’t have soul then you leave yourself up for disruption, so I implore you to bring up this before you even start putting down those vector lines.

How to know if your brand has soul before you have launched? Firstly, if we assume that humans have souls then I believe the only way for a brand to have soul is if its product and company have a direct relationship with its consumers and employees in more than just a one-way street conversation. We need dialogue with both the product and the company to have any chance of creating brand soul. Therefore, for a brand to have soul it needs to be truly authentic to those people.

Secondly, it’s community over customers. This means that for our brand to have soul we need to treat everyone like they have one too, so you need to treat your community with integrity. For example, pretend your customers are a small rural community and your brand is the mayor. If the mayor is unauthentic then the community will find out soon enough, and when they do they’ll discredit all the work that they’ve done prior. So don’t cut corners when it comes to your community.

Lastly, authentic intention. From the ground up your brand will be rough around the edges in some way, but make sure your intention is pure, because as humans we all know we’re far from our Instagram feed. Our brains aren’t machines, so a brand needs to hold similar unpredictability at its core, which might mean designs and products don’t go as initially planned. But your community will support and understand as long as you have authentic intention and an open dialogue, which will boost your brand’s power bar in the soul category.

As we work on creating the next Apple or Nike (someone will), we all strive for the concept of perfection before launch, and what better way to put all that pressure and expectation onto the logo. How about instead of perfection being judged by correct alignment of graphics or stories with no grammatical errors, the right complementary colours or the perfect stitching on the garment, we measure it by the brand’s connection to its consumers and employees souls through open dialogue? Only then can we embrace a brand’s “why they exist”, instead of focusing on how well made, how cheap and how fast their product is. A brand with soul will always have much more longevity than a single product release.

So it’s probably better you launch your brand with a logo that looks a bit shit, and explain why to everyone it is a bit shit, because the best brand identities are not about how nice their logo is, but about how much soul from the start they had.

Thank you for reading,
Adam