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Author: Robert Saywitz

Infusing a Brand with Big Heart Begins with Big Thinking: How Small Design Cues Can Generate Great Big Feels

Posted on by Robert Saywitz

“We need to make our brand feel human. It needs to reflect our people and our customers. We need to tell a human, emotive story.”

 

This is how a lot of our conversations about brand design begin. If we were designing for packaged goods that sit on a shelf and give people a tangible representation of your brand, we’d have a well defined experience to address. But most of our work takes place behind the scenes in the B2B and tech space. There are no shelves or stores mediating the process, no physical objects or packaging. There’s sparse or no direct interaction with the end-user. And the technology itself is invisible which increases the challenge of crafting a bespoke visual identity that evokes emotion.

Curating a distinct visual style is table stakes when developing design systems. But we’ve seen that in B2B branding, sometimes the smaller, more nuanced design moves can transform a smart visual identity design into a deeply evocative brand that evokes just the right feelings. Because these design moves don’t hit people over the head, they may not fully register at first glance, but over time, they shape the response people have to a brand.

A sense of (e)motion

Motion elevates the game. While static logos aren’t going away, just about every brand needs to move in some way, shape or form—whether it’s a dynamic logo or a kinetic design system that pushes the limits. And it’s often the little moments that spark delight—the sudden blink of a circle, the anthropomorphic smile in a lowercase ‘e’, or a subtle twinkle of light to punctuate a moment in the story. It’s these moments that draw people deeper into the brand story in the same way that physical packaging might speak directly to a consumer with an elegant serif font or bespoke illustration.

Our recent work to rebrand Katapult—an AI platform behind the e-commerce scenes that gives customers a fair way to pay for their purchases online—was an opportunity for our team to bring all the heart, feeling and optimism of the customer to the forefront of the brand. Sure, the photography needed to capture the heart and goodness underlying the brand, but we had to go deeper. So we used their name as our launching-off point, or catapult, if you will. Rather than trying to force all of our storytelling into a logo symbol, we crafted a wordmark that evokes the feeling of the human hand signing for a bill of goods. That calligraphic sense of motion led our team to develop something more emotive than just a symbol—a brand feeling of being uplifted and elevated. This feeling—which came to be known as “The Bounce”—comes through at every turn, from the upward curve that literally bounces off screen, guides storytelling in infographics, or connects images, words and ideas together. Ultimately, “The Bounce” became more than a visual component—it became a deeply felt personality trait of the brand—and something the client could really get behind as an emotive representative of the brand, something much greater than a traditional logo symbol.

Sonic branding

Just like the barrage of visuals that we experience every day, our world is filled with sounds (a lot of it noise). In addition to motion, sound has a similar capacity to evoke feelings and brings another dimension to what a brand—and more specifically, a logo—can do. Sonic branding adds a richness to the brand experience, often creating a more bespoke and lasting imprint on how you experience (and recall) a brand. The Disney+ logo that introduces their content is a good example of a small moment that adds a big feel to how you interact with their identity. Now, it may be that I’ve seen/heard their identity more times than I care to count while watching with my 7-year old, but there’s no denying how seeing AND hearing that magical beam of light swoop over the wordmark makes a deeper impression. It puts viewers into a state of curiosity and preparation for what’s about to come on screen. The ability to generate that lean-in feeling is a mark of a truly successful logo experience.

Our recent rebrand project for Pindrop included a sonic dimension to the brand. Because Pindrop is a pioneer in the voice technology space, creating a sonic brand was a strategic imperative. It was exciting to work with our partners at MusicVergnuegen to craft an audio component that brought Pindrop’s invisible, future-forward technology to life with a sound of a safe unlocking. Similar to Disney+, it’s hard not to smile when their logo symbol transforms and resolves on an audio crescendo. It’s the little things that often make the most impact.

Design needs to solve problems and deliver on the goals of the client but also has the great potential to unlock new ways of seeing, hearing and experiencing a brand. See (and hear) more of our work here and let us know if we can partner together to help solve your branding challenges.

Simplicity Does Not Mean Simple: An Outside Perspective on the Art of Simplification

Posted on by Robert Saywitz

Legend has it that Hemingway once won a bet for the shortest story ever written by crafting a six-word story, “For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn.” True or not, what resonates from this tale is that simplicity does not necessarily mean simple. ‘Less’ can actually mean ‘more’. When you strip everything away except the most meaningful parts, it forces those remaining parts to tell the whole story.

It supposedly took Leonard Cohen five years of rewriting lyrics until—80 draft verses later—he settled on the final version of his song “Hallelujah”. The art of simplification—from words and stories to pictures and objects, even our own lives—is a difficult process. Simplification is not just about redaction, but a strategic process in itself—the distillation of a complex problem or story down to the essential ideas. Anyone can take things away, but it takes a certain level of craft, critical thought, and tenacity to simplify with precision to tell a compelling story.

Beyond Beauty

The art of simplification pervades many aspects of our lives, but these days it seems that when we think of the relationship between form and function, we often think of product design.

Dieter Rams is a German designer and minimalist visionary who served as the Chief Design Officer at Braun for much of his career. Dieter Rams’s Design Principles is a culmination of the “less is more” philosophy that he used to evaluate work and ask the big question, “What makes Good Design?”. A core belief is that when simplicity can be used to illuminate function, aesthetics go beyond beauty to resonate on a much deeper level. One shouldn’t have to struggle to experience good design—it should clarify and create an emotive response.

“Good design is as little design as possible.”
—Dieter Rams

Dieter Rams for Braun
RT 20 tischsuper radio, 1961, by Dieter Rams for Braun

 

George Lois, a renowned Art Director probably best known for the many provocative covers he designed for Esquire magazine in the 1960s, brought the art of simplification to the world of advertising to such dramatic effect that it was met with shock and applause in equal measure. In fact, his 1960 advertisement for Coldene made it onto my own mood board for a recent branding project for a trading platform called Topstep—exemplifying how a simplified typographic treatment alone could still move mountains.

Coldene-George-Luis
George Lois Coldene ad

Less Really Is More

As brand designers, our goal is to utilize design to build a powerful story—editing, clarifying, and distilling our design expression to the most essential elements. There is often a misconception that simplicity of form can reduce the depth and sophistication of the storytelling. “What do you mean our new logo is just a wordmark? Just letters, no symbol? We need a symbol, an icon, something! Well, if it is just letters, can we at least get our own FedEx moment?”

It may seem counterintuitive to clients, but adding additional touchpoints, words, visual elements—more ‘things’—will ultimately dilute the power of the message. Simplicity of form and strategic restraint actually helps clarify and amplify the story, so long as simplicity functions to reveal the brand idea—and that the brand idea is crafted from a solid, strategic platform that holds it all together. Deep research and strategy create the foundation of the brand, which should then infuse every design decision along the way. Ultimately, this combination of clear strategy and design allows the brand expression to cut through the clutter of the marketplace. As a designer, I pay rigorous attention to details to ensure that what I am creating is not only beautiful, but also easy to understand and purposeful. It’s my job to use design to bring complex ideas into sharp focus, and make the complex intuitively clear.

“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple—that’s creativity.”
—Charles Mingus

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in Oakland, California.

Uncovering the True Dynamics of Strategy + Design Synergy: A Conversation Between Robert Saywitz and Giovanna Blackston Keren

Posted on by Robert Saywitz

Our recent work rebranding Topstep—a financial trading platform based in Chicago, IL—shed light not only on our belief in the power of simplicity and clarity for our client but also on internal agency processes that helped us create an authentically differentiated brand. I sat down recently with our Director of Strategy, Giovanna Blackston Keren, to have a candid conversation about our roles in this process and why agencies seem to talk about the relationship between Strategy and Design more often than it comes together successfully in real life. We used our work on Topstep as a prism for this discussion because, in many ways, the project typified how we seamlessly crafted a strategy + design experience from start to finish. Giovanna asked all the right questions.

Why are agencies always talking about the collaboration between Strategy and Design? If it really happens so seamlessly, and if it’s the norm, then why are we all still talking about it?

The truth is, a seamless integration of the two is the ideal but not all agencies are able to pull it off. With Topstep, as with other clients, we were able to bridge the gap by bringing designers into the project early and keeping strategists involved throughout the process. Inviting designers to the initial kickoffs and key meetings helped them absorb the full brand story, informing their creative development. Inviting strategists to provide quick gut-checks throughout the creative process also kept things moving forward while also voicing moments when design needed to shift or even stand down and let the strategy come through more prominently. Extending involvement in both directions is often a problem of bandwidth, but well worth it in the end.

Why do you think that Strategy and Design often seem to be on such different pages, that actually finding a way for us to be talking the same language is challenging?

There is often a natural divide between the expert skill sets of the Strategist and the Designer but, here at Emotive Brand, we bridge that gap in a few ways. One is by having designers involved in Strategy meetings and vice versa; we have also started to share knowledge within our teams through skill-sharing workshops so that Strategists and Designers understand what each other do and literally begin to speak the same language. It also helps that we have specific roles for Creative Strategists—strategists with design/writing backgrounds and steeped in design but performing as a high-level strategic thinker and, at times, a copywriter for the designers and presentations. Their role often transcends boundaries and is the connective thread between strategy and design processes, as well as the articulation of creative thinking to the client. Specifically, with Topstep, this seamless dialogue between Strategy and Design allowed us to focus on the inauthentic, dry, and confusing nature of the language of most financial institutions. Our designers utilized this insight to tap into something bespoke and authentic—cutting through the clutter with radical honesty and a bold, language-driven typographic system.

So often throughout my career, I’ve felt like when I’m finally sharing the strategic blueprint with designers, they tend to see it as shackles rather than a wellspring for exploration—even though the strategy platform is usually built upon months and months of research, interviews, and insights. Do you see Strategy as a constraint in your process?

I actually find that the right kind of constraint can function as a creative accelerant to get you to the strongest ideas much quicker, but perhaps guardrails is a better word than constraints because, without the guidance of the strategy, you’re often jumping around in different directions, exploring far too many ideas that don’t have the grounding of the strategy. I have a fine art background so I know all too well that stepping up to a blank canvas with no plan in mind is much more of an overwhelming challenge than when I have my sketchbook full of notes to guide my process. When you have strategic limits in place, it creates much more freedom and opportunity for a deeper exploration rather than wider, and in this sense, the rules can actually set you free. When we started our initial ideation for Topstep’s new brand identity, we cast a wide net with 20-30 different mood boards but the strategy helped us efficiently narrow our focus to 5 of the most relevant and resonant options that embodied the strategy and the kind of brand that Topstep wanted to be.

Ultimately, we’re not creating just brand strategies, and we’re not creating visual identities. We’re creating brand experiences, brand worlds, and those worlds have to be built out of Strategy and Design.

Yes, the success we enjoyed with Topstep came from the constant conversation between designers and strategy along the journey—using the strategic platform as a foundational road map for creative exploration. We were very purposeful in bringing the client along on the journey as an active participant and everything we presented to them was met with a very open discussion about our rationale for design decisions—no feedback or pain point was too delicate to unpack between us, which is often a missed opportunity between agency and client. I think that level of honest conversation from the very start of the strategy process through the end of design helped build a foundation of trust and respect between us and the client that allowed us to move much more efficiently and make great decisions together. Ultimately, it helped a great deal when it came time to sell in a radically simple design direction.

The final design direction for Topstep was directly inspired by one of the territories that we brought to Topstep in our Strategy Workshop “And the rules shall set you free.” Traders often feel that the rules hold them back from really being able to be the successful trader they think they can be but, in reality, it is these very rules that keep them on the right path to ultimate success. Seems like a meaningful parallel here with our conversation about the relationship between Strategy and Design?

Definitely. Just as Strategy provides guardrails, it also allows you to explore freely without feeling like you’re staring at that blank canvas, reaching for any idea that may be well-executed but has no relevance with the business or what it is we’re trying to achieve, and in that way, the rules really can set you free. For Topstep, we harnessed this strategic freedom to move against the grain of the natural instinct for many clients to add as many elements into the composition as possible to tell their story and opting for being utterly clear, simple, and to the point, and in the financial world, that becomes quite radical.

“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.” — Hans Hofmann

Click the link to see our work for Topstep: https://www.emotivebrand.com/topstep/

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in Oakland, California.

Back to School: An Interactive Presentation at Orinda Intermediate School

Posted on by Robert Saywitz

This past October, Design Director Robert Saywitz and Production Director Jonathan Fisher found themselves back at Orinda Intermediate School for the second annual “Power of Branding” workshop.

Similar to last year, students were given a brief history of branding – the power of symbols in our culture, logo design, and how brands can evolve over time. Students were then broken into teams and tasked with either creating a new brand identity for a fictional educational startup, or rebranding Amazon’s existing identity.

More than ever, it showed the importance of teamwork in problem-solving and letting creativity rise to the forefront to find the most interesting solutions. The enthusiasm of the kids was infectious and, just like last year, we as working professionals learned quite a bit from them as well.

The most successful teams absorbed the things they saw in our presentation and found unique ways to make their brand stand out. For example, utilizing the strength of owning a color and applying a logo consistently across various applications.

As with the professional world, there was a misconception that rebranding an existing company isn’t as challenging, fun, or creative as coming up with something from scratch. A lot of teams this year came to the hard realization that it is actually quite difficult to create something new and exciting while still maintaining the core essence of the brand.


While this team kept close to Amazon’s current brand idea – we have everything from A-to-Z – they were able to reimagine the brand through color and form, crafting a dynamic paper airplane to signify their delivery capabilities and soaring to new heights, which created a consistent graphic thread through the applications. It was a challenging assignment, and they brought a renewed energy to an old idea.

Time management is something that plays a role in these workshops and may be an area to iterate on for next year. Do we structure the day differently, or make time management more of a focus for how the students can approach the design challenge?

“It was interesting to see how some groups really took to the challenge, figured out what needed to happen, understood the time constraints, and got to work,” said Jonathan Fisher. “While others spent a good portion just chatting about it, getting distracted, and it wasn’t until we gave the warnings that time was running out that they dove into the ‘panic mode’ of trying to get everything done.”

“The one disadvantage of working with so many classes in just one day is obviously the time, so we’re thinking of different ways to get creative with the time we have for next year,” says Robert Saywitz. “I think a big missed opportunity is that the students finish their assignment and just turn it in for us to judge later. A big part of our process at Emotive Brand is not only creating the work but presenting it, both internally and to our clients. I’d love for students to have a chance to actually present their work back to us and the other students.”

One area where the students surpassed the previous year was really dialing into the naming and tagline aspect. There was so much interest in this that we created a Best Name and Best Tagline category for the awards list. Names and taglines didn’t get a lot of attention in the presentation, but the students really took these on with gusto, and it showed.

For instance, “School Tools” had the tagline, “Keeping everyone on the same page.” More than just a functional descriptor, a great tagline should play off the name and logo, and be strategically on point with intellect and wit in order to win the hearts and minds of your target audience. They excelled on all accounts.

“Classmate” and “Pencils Down” tied for first place in the Best Names category. As in business, a great name needs no explanation. When thinking about an online app that streamlines the interaction between students and their classes, “Classmate” and “Pencils Down” says it all.

“At this age, these kids are not as jaded as our professional counterparts,” says Robert Saywitz. “We adults usually weigh our ideas against the usual guardrails: Is this going to work? Is this realistic? Will we be able to sell this through? These students are not bound by any creative limitations and this showed in a lot of the work with their ‘reaching for the stars’ mentality of making something creatively out there.”

In the end, we witnessed the same vibrancy, excitement, and creative tension that we see in our own studio every day. In a way, creating a workshop for children is an exceptional exercise for how to create a foolproof exercise for clients. If there is any ambiguity, any unclear directions, any room for chaos, children will find and exploit it. So will clients. Balancing time management, crystal clear instructions, and just the right amount of creative freedom are all transferable skills to the world of branding. Every year, we learn something new from this presentation. We only hope they left as inspired as we did.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in Oakland, California.

A Deep Dive into Designing for Accessibility

Posted on by Robert Saywitz

Today’s blog is about our recent work with the Galt Foundation, an organization that provides, promotes, and expands employment opportunities for individuals with disabilities. You can view our full case study here. The following post is available as both a text and audio experience.

 

Designing for Accessibility Is a Duty, Not an Option

As designers, we have the opportunity to create experiences that bring people together, but we also have a responsibility to create work which can be experienced by everyone, regardless of ability. That’s not to say that everyone will perceive or appreciate the work in the same way, but it remains our duty as designers to provide certain baseline aesthetics which allow for everyone to understand the information.

Most people agree with that sentiment, but perhaps it lives more in the hearts and minds of designers than in the actual finished products we see in the world. For instance, how many smart tablets or watches with braille have you seen or felt lately? The technology is there, but the widespread implementation is not.

Good design should resonate with the end-user on an intellectual and emotional level, and most importantly, it should champion inclusivity. Inside jokes have their place, but when it comes to communicating a brand promise or conveying important messaging, clarity and accessibility should reign supreme.

Can Design Be Accessible and Still Be Beautiful?

There is a misconception that, by nature, designing for optimal accessibility will result in work that is less sophisticated or visually engaging. If you’re like me, you’ve spent a good part of many commutes on the train silently critiquing the PSA poster designs.

A Deep Dive into Designing for Accessibility - MTA

Having recently created a new brand identity with strict accessibility parameters, I can attest to the fact that while it might be more challenging and require a deeper strategic approach, it is more than possible to embrace accessibility while still crafting beautiful and dynamic work.

When it comes to designing with disability in mind, architects and industrial designers have been ahead of the curve for decades. Buildings are outfitted with wheelchair access. Phones are designed for people with hearing impairments. In fact, SMS texting was originally developed for the deaf, but when texting dramatically saved telecom bandwidth, the world of cellular telecommunications changed.

The question with which I was concerned over the last year was how does this design mentality translate into designing an entire brand experience – from a logo and tactile stationery, to a digital experience on a website and mobile phone?

Finding Opportunity in Constraints

“Can we make the type bigger?” Many designers have heard this feedback at one time or another. The last thing a designer wants is to compromise their artistic vision – especially if the request doesn’t stem from a strategic design point of view – but designing for inclusivity can actually force open new windows of creative opportunity. Accessible design doesn’t need to mean safe, boring, or pedestrian. In fact, it might just allow the design to develop into something even better. As with any client, everything begins with understanding the problems that need to be solved, both from a strategy and design perspective.

1. The Who, What, and Why?

The Galt Foundation is an Oregon-based non-profit professional staffing service that places people with disabilities in temporary government jobs. They had a successful business model but wanted to expand across the U.S. while launching entry into the private sector.

The challenge was to create a brand platform that would allow them to tell their story to both private and public sector clients, as well as prospective employees. They needed a visual identity that could resonate with employees of the Facebooks and Googles of the world, as well as government institutions. One that could sit alongside iconic, mission-driven brands like Planned Parenthood and Conservation International, yet still be fully inclusive of people with disabilities. In my mind, the common thread that bridged this gap was purposeful, well-crafted simplicity.

A Deep Dive into Designing for Accessibility - Venn Diagram

2. Design Criteria

First of all, we needed to clearly define what is and what is not “accessible” as it pertains to the project. Understanding the parameters of what was considered a disability in the context of this project helped set my team’s and client’s expectations, and allowed me to see how much we could push its design.

In the application of the brand, it was also important to know the differences between digital and non-digital accessibility. A key design deliverable for this project was redesigning the company website in compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) – a robust, continually evolving guideline of referenceable technical standards with testable success criteria. I quickly understood the limitations we faced with the online experience: strict rules for type-size minimums, visual cues for navigation, and essentially removing any motion effects, iconography, and a host of other potential graphic devices.

3. Know the Rules

When accessibility is a design criterion, you need to know how to evaluate your work properly, rather than designing in a vacuum. In the case of Galt, in order for me to create an accessible color palette, I needed to understand how the work would ultimately look to people with vision impairment. Specifically, varying types of color blindness, as color blindness affects approximately 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women in the world.

There are many online tools for evaluating digital color. For example, Color Oracle applies a filter to your monitor to simulate how things look to someone with color blindness. Using it, you truly realize the implications of vision impairment within the context of “surfing the web.” It was clear that color could not be used as the only visual tool for conveying information, prompting a response/action, nor distinguishing a visual element.

A Deep Dive into Designing for Accessibility - Venn Diagram - color wheel

4. Audit, Audit, Audit

A comprehensive audit and immersion help me to not only understand where the client currently is from a design perspective but also to understand the target audience and competitors. What are the best (and worst) practices out there? This information plays a crucial role in how I determine the specific areas of opportunity for the creative approach, and how design can help differentiate the client in their space.

Sometimes, as was the case with Galt, the insights gathered from the audit, combined with our accessibility criterion, actually created new design obstacles that needed to be overcome. For example, the necessity of a color blind-appropriate palette pushed us towards the blue spectrum, yet our audit of competitor brands revealed heavy use of blue. Ultimately, the totality of this information led us to strategically and empathically differentiate Galt with a proprietary green.

5. Get to Work

Exploration, ideation, rinse and repeat; that’s the usual routine for a designer. However, I found that in addition to the usual rigor of my creative process, empathy needed to take a front seat at our internal design reviews. At every step of the way, I asked a series of questions: would this be confusing to someone with a hearing or vision impairment? Can this be even clearer and more accessible? Is this language too esoteric? Are certain design elements here just for show, or do they add relevance to the story?

A key lesson I learned from this process was to remain perpetually open to questions about what is possible, rather than solely focusing on standard processes. New ideas will constantly present themselves, but you need to be listening. Design thinking and design aesthetics can, and should, live together. Ultimately, it’s a matter of shifting our mindset to employ more strategic, empathic, and inclusive design thinking without compromising our creativity and sophistication. When design can solve for accessibility and still maintain a level of elegance and beauty, it’s a win-win for everyone.

Can a Logo be Simple, Accessible, and Still Tell a Complex, Meaningful Story?

The answer is a resounding yes. Designing for accessibility first, then pushing design within those parameters is not the norm, but can result in ideas that are more unique and often better than the standard. Designing for accessibility only tightens the guardrails, forcing the designer to elevate the entire process to tell a compelling story. You’ll find that your creativity is challenged to use more grounded design thinking to solve a problem, rather than trying to throw visual tricks or effects at a problem.

Before starting a project, I always used to ask, “How can I best tell this story?” After working on Galt, I might rephrase that as, “How can I best tell this story for as many people as possible?” Remember, we aren’t designing for design’s sake – we are designing for everyone.

Click here to see the complete case study for Galt.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in San Francisco.