When a brand comes to me, I usually end up seeing a lot more than whatever they walked in asking for. Someone might want a logo, and while we're still talking I'm already picturing where the whole thing could go, the colors it pulls in, the stories it could carry, the shape it might take a few years down the road. I've believed for a long time that taste is quietly becoming one of the most valuable things a business can have, and that creators are the ones who carry it, which is why I think more and more brands are going to lean on us to help them see the entire world an idea could grow into, and to build the taste that gets it there.
Why is taste the thing a brand can't fake?
Taste is really just direction. It's style, and it's the particular way a person sees the world and decides what fits and what doesn't, and you can't buy that in a template or reverse-engineer it from a trend report, because by the time a trend is clear enough for everyone to copy, whoever created it has usually already drifted somewhere new. Creators tend to live with their hand on the pulse of culture, so we feel where things are heading before they fully arrive, and that instinct is the part a business can't manufacture on its own. It's also the part that tends to age well, long after the trends everybody chased have come and gone.
What it means to see a universe instead of a brand
There's a framework I keep coming back to from Houston Howard, who has built IP strategy for people like Disney Imagineering and Mattel. He calls it the Super Story, and the heart of it is that you're almost always better off building a world that can generate many stories than a single story that just ends. He points to Star Wars, which was architected from the very start to keep expanding into films and characters and games and books for decades, and that's a completely different animal from a movie that comes out, does well, and quietly closes the book. A lot of brands get built like that closed-book movie, and the ones I'm drawn to are the ones that actually want to become a world.
How I actually work this way
In practice it almost always starts small, sometimes with nothing more than a logo. But while I'm designing that logo I'm already seeing the rest of it, the colors it implies and the themes it keeps circling back to and the way it might eventually stretch into a film, or a book, or a whole visual language, depending on what the business really is and where it wants to go. What I'm really doing is laying a foundation the work can keep growing out of, instead of just wrapping the job up and moving on, so there's a starting point, I get my head around it, and I stay honest that I don't know exactly where it lands, which is why I keep watching culture and reading where it's headed and helping the thing evolve in that direction.
Why this matters if you're building something
So if you're building something right now, executing the project in front of you is honestly the easy part, and plenty of people can do it well. The rarer thing is finding someone who can look at what you have and see the whole universe it could turn into, and then start laying the foundation for that today. That's the work I care about most, and if it's the kind of thinking you'd want in your corner, I'd love to talk. Let's work together.