Overlay
Let's talk
Emotive Brand
Get in touch: [email protected] 510-496-8888

Hello!

Tag: Design

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.

Challenger Brands: Design that Disrupts

Posted on by Emotive Brand

Challenger Creative

This post is the last in our three-part series on challenger brands. You can read a general primer to challenger brands or a deep dive into B2B challengers right here.

Previously, we chatted about the power of adopting a challenger mindset, how to compete against your category, and what the B2B world can learn from B2C disruptors. In these examples, most of the strategies were internal. It was a question of knowing how to recognize the pressure for change, creating a shared vision, having the capacity to execute, and building out a realistic work plan.

But still, the question remains: what does this actually look like in the real world? Today, we’re going to dive into some examples of challenger brands that use design to disrupt. While there’s no one definition for challenger creative, you tend to know it when you see. Most recently, it’s an aesthetic that incorporates clean branding, catchy names displayed in modern fonts, bright pops of color, and sleek packaging. It’s unapologetically bold, playful, and unafraid to subvert the expectations of the form. It’s a design that knows how to transform positives into negatives and creates a lasting impression.

Thanks for the Warm-Up

Sometimes you’re fighting against the market, and sometimes you’re fighting against people’s perceptions. From a marketing and viewership point of view, the relationship between the Olympics and the Paralympics is a contentious one. As we all know, the Olympics airs first, and garners much more attention and ad-budget. So, how do you respond when everyone thinks of your offer as secondary?

With a bold commercial that repositions the Olympics as merely the “warm-up,” this commercial asserts that the Paralympics is where Super Humans do battle. Even the way the commercial starts—leading the viewer from the firework show to a tunnel underground—demonstrates that this is an alternate, grittier world we are entering. It sets the tone for the whole games. Anyone can run on two feet—come see a real show.

Challenger Brands Design that Disrupts Paralympics

The Perks of Being a Couch Potato

In a world of Amazon, Walmart, Target, and Overstock, is there anything gutsier than trying to sell furniture online? Burrow, a sofa startup, is up to the challenge. Incorporating gorgeous photography, cheeky copy, and a deep understanding of millennial behavior, they have created a campaign that is capturing attention. Their tagline, “Good for Nothing,” is a perfect self-deprecating turn of phrase that speaks to their sense of humor and willingness to disrupt the status quo.

“‘Good for Nothing’ positions Burrow as the sofa brand that’s serious about leisure,” says Red Antler Co-founder and Strategy Chief Emily Heyward. “And the goal of our out-of-home campaign in New York is to remind everyone who’s rushing by and commuting in the busiest city in the world that it’s OK to go home tonight and do absolutely nothing. Hopefully on a comfortable Burrow sofa.”

Challenger Brands Design that Disrupts Burrow

Repairing the Male Ego

Challenging giant corporations is one thing, but using design to challenge stigma and vulnerability is another. Hims, a personal wellness brand, is fueled by one challenger belief—men are allowed to want to take care of themselves. The question is, does the market agree? Well, by March of 2018, Hims had already sold roughly $10 million in product and reached $200 million in valuation. (They only launched in November 2017.) So, that’s a big yes.

“These brands have an aesthetic that appeals to millennials,” said Allen Adamson, Brand Consultant and Co-founder of Metaforce. “It’s smart design without being ostentatious or too snooty. All these products are stylish, and they don’t necessarily pick up on the cues of the category. They pick up on the design language that surrounds young people today.”

Hims’ product line reads like a short list of things that should be difficult to market to those who are uncomfortable talking about it—hair loss, erectile dysfunction, skincare, and vitamins. Instead of shying away from stigma or taboos, they’ve turned it into a massive business opportunity.

Challenger Brands Design that Disrupts Hims

Bird Is the Word

E-scooters are a controversial business, but don’t expect Bird’s founder, Travis VanderZaden, to back down from a challenge. Bird was named Inc’s business of the year, and with good reason. In 14 months, they have expanded to 120 cities and notched a $2 billion evaluation.

The design of Bird feels both professional and whimsical at the same time. The black and white look of the scooter is sleek and clean, but the animated landing video on their website looks like something out of Pixar, full of color and imagination. They seem to capture the childlike freedom of riding a scooter and the Uber-like vision of transforming how a city runs. Their design leaves them poised to take on anyone, whether that’s fellow e-scooter brands, ride-sharing, or even automobile makers.

“He told me the idea of adult scooters and explained how riders would just leave them on the sidewalk, and I was incredulous. I thought he was crazy,” says David Sacks, an early PayPal executive who invested in the company’s seed round. “Once I went to Santa Monica, I realized it was magical,” he says, after he scootered to his destination, without waiting for a cab or sitting in traffic. “I started thinking about how big this idea could become and realized that it’s transformational. You could have millions of these, and start displacing car trips for commuters—and eventually redesign cities.”

Challenger Brands Design that Disrupts Bird

Time to Face the Challenge

Now that we’ve covered strategy, mindset, and design, it’s time to adopt a challenger mindset for your own brand. Every year it gets harder and harder for brands to stand out from the pack. Meaning, there’s never been a better time to be bold, fired-up, and willing to take a risk to differentiate yourself.

To learn more about how your brand can benefit from adopting a challenger mindset, contact Tracy Lloyd at [email protected].

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.

Feeling the Holiday Spirit: Introducing Emotive Feels

Posted on by Chris Ames

Emotion Is Everything

For brands to make an impact on the outside world, they must explore inner worlds. In our line of work, emotion is everything. The most successful brands are those that evoke feeling—that ignite new ways of thinking about the world and our unique place in it

At Emotive Brand, naturally, we’re obsessed with emotion. We believe every company can perform better if its brand connects with people on an emotional level. A brand that’s emotive triggers feelings, inspires action, earns loyalty, and lifts spirits. In the overcrowded business world, your brand must resonate rationally and emotionally. Never overlook the mind, but always aim for the heart.

Emotional Impact

As part of our methodology, we’ve identified 301 positive emotions that a brand could possibly elicit in their target audience. These range from expected—supported, enabled, secure—to unconventional—nostalgic, vibrant, zealous. We call this set of feelings an Emotional Impact, and it acts as a compass for guiding creative and strategic decisions.

Emotional Impact is a tool we use in workshops, it’s on our business cards, and all 301 emotions even hang as separate tiles on our office wall. This year for our holiday card, we were thinking of another, more expressive way to bring this methodology to life.

Introducing Emotive Feels

And so, we created Emotive Feels—an interactive dictionary all about emotion. For each entry, we paired graphic design and animation with quotes from our team and influential thinkers. More than just defining the feeling, we’re seeking to enact it through motion and emotion.

“Visualizing the set of 301 positive emotions has always been very important to us,” said Creative Director Thomas Hutchings. “We are always looking for new ways to do this and find new ways for people to engage with this emotion-first philosophy. This site adds to this quest. It’s fun, engaging, and meaningful. It’s always been important to us to make sure this comes through. A methodology should never be laborious and self-serving.”

To be a truly emotive brand requires more than creating one-off emotional ads. It’s about forging valuable emotional connections at every touchpoint: your logo, your website, even the tone of voice your employees use on customer calls. When brands behave this way, they connect more meaningfully with their audiences. This means people are more likely to remain loyal and engaged, and ultimately feel bonded to the promise of the brand in the long term.

“The Emotive Feels site is such a great opportunity for our studio to showcase a unique aspect that separates us from other agencies,” says Designer Keyoni Scott. “The creation of the site makes our methodology tangible so it can always live on the web and be a tool to help anyone learn about the ways we help brands thrive. We’re always striving to evoke feeling through design.”

“The big buzzword in design is ‘empathy,’” says Senior Designer Jonathan Haggard. Everyone wants to design with empathy for their end-user in mind, which is great, but the conversation usually stops there. In order to effectively design for your customers, it’s best to understand them on a visceral and emotional level. At this level, you are able to affect their perceptions using the principles of design to build a brand or product that amplifies certain emotional responses.”

On Emotive Feels, you’ll find inspirational words from poets, designers, editors, strategists, musicians, artists, and historians. You’ll see shapes shift, bend, twist, morph, spin, snake, and dance. And when you’re done, we hope you leave feeling differently than when you arrived.

“Emotional Impact has always been embedded in our design process, so this project was a fun opportunity to create something visually engaging around our methodology and have it live beyond our office walls,” said Design Director Robert Saywitz. “I think it’s also vital to constantly exercise that creative muscle by carving out the time to create internal projects such as these, where imagination really leads the charge and allows everyone to be involved for a true team effort.”

From our hearts to yours, we hope the holidays are merry and bright.

The blog will return after the holiday break in January 2020.

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

Non-Business Books to Improve Your Brain and Brand

Posted on by Chris Ames

When I worked in a bookstore, I would often help young businesspeople find the books their bosses wanted them to read. This assignment was to help them expand their thinking, get a new perspective, and stand out from the crowd. But invariably, they would always ask for “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” or if they were in sales, “The Art of War.”

To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with these titles! But in the words of Haruki Murakami, “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”

The following books are recommendations outside the business section that will, nonetheless, still greatly improve the way you think about language, design, communication, memory, the world around you, and your brand’s place in it.

Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“Suppose I were to begin by saying I had fallen in love with a color.”

In 240 numbered fragments, Bluets is a philosophical inquiry, a color study, a personal narrative, an ode to an unnamed lover, a history lesson, and a world filtered through the color blue. Expertly juggling such divergent voices as Wittgenstein, Sei Shonagon, William Gass, and Joan Mitchell, Bluets is a brilliant little book that will forever change your relationship to the color blue.

The takeaway: There is immense power in owning a single color. When building your visual identity, don’t fail to consider color psychology.

Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey

“Someone reading a book is a sign of order in the world.”

Over the course of 15 years, award-winning poet Mary Ruefle delivered a lecture every six months to a group of poetry graduate students. These lectures articulate the wisdom accrued through a life dedicated entirely to poetry, and this book is essentially a crash-course humanities degree.

The takeaway: The most successful thought leadership provides the best and deepest answers to your customers’ biggest questions. Think about structuring your thought leadership as an engaging lecture to deliver, either online or as part of a lecture series.

Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read

“Words are effective not because of what they carry in them, but for their latent potential to unlock the accumulated experience of the reader. Words ‘contain’ meanings, but, more important, words potentiate meaning.”

What We See When We Read is a gorgeously unique, fully illustrated exploration into the phenomenology of reading—how we visualize images from reading works of literature, from one of our very best book jacket designers, himself a passionate reader.

The takeaway: Narrative doesn’t have to be exhaustive—it just has to contain enough to spark curiosity in your target audience. Try writing your narrative in shorter and shorter iterations: 500 words, 100 words, 10 words, until you’ve crystalized your story down to its most potent elements.

Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

“If you want to live a memorable life, you have to be the kind of person who remembers to remember.”

In this super entertaining memoir, a science journalist enters the United States Memory Championship, a competition where “mental athletes” battle to see who can remember such things as an entire deck of cards or the names and faces of 117 strangers. It’s a fascinating inquiry into how we remember and organize information in our minds.

The takeaway: We remember information best when it is tied to loci. How are you housing your most complex information? Your content strategy should be like a well-designed house: a room for each piece of information, with clear pathways for users to navigate, all laddering up to something greater than the sum of its parts. This is how our brain operates, so why not operate your communications the same way?

Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams

“Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see.”

Beginning with her experience as a medical actor, paid to act out symptoms for medical students to diagnose, Leslie Jamison’s visceral and revealing essays ask essential questions about our basic understanding of others: How should we care about one another? How can we feel another’s pain, especially when pain can be assumed, distorted, or performed?

The takeaway: Empathy is your secret weapon. When you’re close to a business’ daily operations, it’s hard to see how your brand is perceived by the people you serve, both as customers and employees. To create a meaningful brand, you need practice in stepping out of your own perceptions. There’s an inherent deliberateness, thoughtfulness, and patience that comes with empathy. It’s a muscle we should all flex more often.

Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist

“The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life.”

Austin Kleon gave a talk to students at a community college in upstate New York in 2011. For his lecture, he created a list of 10 things he wished he’d heard when he was starting out. Equal parts manifesto and how-to, Steal Like an Artist aims to introduce readers to the idea that all creative work is iterative, no idea is original, and all creators and their output are a sum of their inspirations and heroes.

The takeaway: Do a competitive audit of your field. What do you love? What do you wish you wrote, engineered, designed, built, sold? What can you steal? What can you improve?

What Books Are You Reading?

We’d love to hear what you’re reading and what’s inspiring you. Leave a comment below, or explore this list of further reading:

Edward Tufte, Envisioning Information
Josef Albers, Interaction of Color
Kenya Hara, White
Michael Bierut, Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design
Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage
Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret
Ray Fawkes, One Soul
Stephen King, On Writing
Alan Fletcher, The Art of Looking Sideways
William Kentridge, Six Drawing Lessons
Eleanor Davis, You & a Bike & a Road

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

Introducing the Art of Symbols: How Ancient Symbols Inform Brand Design

Posted on by Chris Ames

After successfully completing the #100DayProject, Emotive Brand is thrilled to launch the Art of Symbols, a website exploring how ancient symbols inform contemporary brand design. Check it out!

The Art of Symbols

As previously discussed, the 100DayProject is a free art project started by Lindsay Thomson that takes place online. Every spring, thousands of people all around the world commit to 100 days of exploring their creativity.

“It’s a lot to commit to, 100 variations on a theme,” said Jonathan Haggard, Senior Designer. “Just like creating anything, the first 90 are the expected and routine, and it’s not until you feel like you’ve scraped the bottom of the barrel that the truly creative stuff comes out.”

The Power of Side Projects

At Emotive Brand, we’ve long believed that side-projects are not only important to keep us inspired and flex new creative muscles, but that it makes our client work much stronger.

“Side projects are critical for me,” continued Jonathan. “I like to keep my momentum going, so when I have a few hours in between client work, I can fill that with some creative exercise. This also pushes me outside of my comfort zone and allows me to learn about subject matter that I may be curious about, but haven’t had a reason to pursue.”

In terms of our next project, we will be exploring Emotive Branding—our methodology of digging deep into a brand’s products and services and finding emotional connections to the needs, beliefs, interests, and aspirations of its target audiences. It’s about aiming for a meaningful outcome from your commercial endeavors, and recognizing that when you touch people in meaningful ways, they pay you back.

Emotive Branding

When it comes to brand strategy, you may not always have all the answers—but chances are, you know exactly how you want your brand to make people feel. If you can hone in on that emotional impact: your employees work with greater purpose and get more satisfaction from their work, your customers become more loyal, and your supply and distribution chains become more responsive to your needs.

This isn’t about creating “emotional” advertising that gets people all misty-eyed about your widgets. Rather, it is about conveying meaning and evoking emotions that draw people closer to you—and sets you apart from your competition. When brands deliver in these ways, it is one of the most powerful ways to differentiate, grow revenue, hire top talent, and more easily deliver customer success stories.

“We are in the process of bringing new life to the 300+ emotions we use with all of our clients,” said Beth Abrahamson, Senior Designer. “Emotions are super intangible and super personal—one feeling can mean twenty different things to twenty different people. We hope that by honing in our interpretation of them, we can provide clients with an Emotive Branding language that is relatable, impactful, and artful.”

Whether you’re an artist, an agency, or just an avid fan of symbols and their histories, we hope you enjoy exploring the Art of Symbols. And as always, keep an eye on our Instagram to stay up to date with our creative projects.

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

The Super Tough Brands of Fragile Masculinity

Posted on by Chris Ames

Last week, the world was given two small wonders: War Paint, a hyper-aggressive makeup brand exclusively for men, and Liquid Death, canned water designed to look like beer. Two “wellness” brands aimed at men, cloaked in the visual language of skulls, tattoos, and violence.

What can these two bizarre companies teach us about the role of gender in branding? And is breaking down male stigma in the wellness space simply a design problem?

Branding … For Him!

Let’s start with War Paint. Their 13-second ad features a heavily tattooed man using various products, flexing his pecs, and adorning himself with a skull ring. Notably missing from this peacocking is how the actual makeup looks on the guy’s face. But that’s not the point of this ad. The point is to disrupt your expectations of makeup and remind you, to a cartoonish degree, that this is for herculean men.

Everything about this brand – the militaristic association of its name, the tattoo parlor visual language, the chant of its tagline “makeup for men, designed by men, for men” – is attempting to shift perception. And in theory, that’s a good thing. For decades, many men have felt uncomfortable with the fact that they have human bodies that require basic care, like moisturizer or water. If War Paint is working toward a future in which men can boldly engage in self-care, that’s progress, right?

Unfortunately, everything about their execution is decidedly backward. Online, many people were off-put by their singular expression of what it means to be a man, and we’re hoping to see a larger spectrum of masculinity represented.

In a tweet attempting to clarify its positioning, War Paint wrote: “If females can have products just for women, why can’t men? Our aim is to allow makeup to be gender neutral and to do that we must have male-specific brands also.”

As Vox writer Cheryl Wischover responded in her piece, “Achieving the goal of increased gender neutrality by making stuff for the underserved ‘males’ demographic struck many as counterintuitive or even nonsensical. The truth is that it probably is still hard for some men to walk into a Sephora and buy makeup. But selling makeup with muscles and war is not going to take away that stigma any time soon.”

The Shape of Water

Let’s shift to Liquid Death, the punk rock canned water aiming to “murder your thirst.” In a way, this feels like a thought exercise for aspiring salespeople. Take the most basic thing possible – water – and make it irresistible. Former Netflix Creative Director Mike Cessario has done just that, raising a new seed round of $1.6 million for his new company. In total, he’s raised $2.25 million for, and I can’t stress this enough, water in a tallboy can. Backers include Biz Stone of Twitter and founders of Dollar Shave Club and Away.

According to Cessario, he’s not solely marketing to the heavily male punk and death metal crowd indicated by the skull logo; he’s targeting the “straight-edgers”– those who eschew drugs and alcohol in a scene often known for both – and doing so under the guise of eco-friendliness because a single, shiny nickel from every $1.83, 16.9oz. can sold will support cleaning up plastics from the ocean.

It would be a shame to deny Liquid Death’s sense of humor. They produced a truly bonkers video called, “Hey Kids, Murder Your Thirst,” which wouldn’t look out of place on Adult Swim. Similar to War Paint, they are aggressively (and joyfully) disrupting the status quo of their category. But here’s the thing: this whole brand narrative is still supported by outdated modes of masculinity. Healthy habits – drinking water, taking care of yourself – shouldn’t need to be draped in distortion and blood to appeal to men.

Why Is Self-Care Gendered?

Ideally, self-care has no gender. Over-indexing on masculinity to make something appeal to men doesn’t encourage actual perception shifts. Quite the opposite, it teaches men to only respond to the violent, the blunt, the obtuse.

As Erika Nicole Kendall noted in her essay, “Marketing has the ability to convey powerful messaging, drive consumer behavior, and legitimize messages we frequently see and hear about ourselves. It simultaneously guides our aspirations and affirms how we see ourselves. When the marketing used to sell wellness brands to the public validates questionable ideas about gender – and, for that matter, race – we should collectively cringe.”

War Paint and Liquid Death are hardly the first, and they won’t be the last. There’s Dude Wipes, which are baby wipes, but for dudes. There’s Man Salt Muscle Soak, which are bath salts, but for men. You’ll never guess who the target audience for the candle company Man Cans is. (Hint: it’s men.)

Perception Shifts

Those who work in branding have a real opportunity to shift perception – if they approach this challenge from a place of curiosity and empathy. What does it mean to be a man in 2019? Whatever we want it to mean. It can be intersectional, non-binary, and yes, masculine, if the aperture of that masculinity is open enough to allow for other identities to exist. Wearing makeup, drinking water, lighting a candle, or taking a bath shouldn’t rattle your identity. If it does, you’ve got bigger problems than branding.

Hair loss company Keeps and wellness brand ForHims are steps in the right direction. Through diverse photography and minimalist design, they are expanding masculinity by focusing on what it means to be human, not just male. There’s still an edginess and personality to their copy, but it refrains from veering into the overtly macho.

“We hope to enable a conversation that’s currently closeted,” goes the ForHims’ about page. “Men aren’t supposed to care for themselves. We call bullshit. The people who depend on you and care about you want you to. To do the most good, you must be well.”

In the productivity-economy, caring about yourself can feel radical. The role of good branding makes those magic moments as accessible, inclusive, and frequent as possible.

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

Image credit

Mind the Gap: Bridging Strategy and Design

Posted on by Jon Schleuning

Here’s a simple truth I’ve learned working at both design-led and strategy-focused agencies. Strategy and design work best when they work together – from beginning to end.

The problem is that strategy and creative are often regarded as separate instead of complementary disciplines. They have separate teams, separate processes, different skillsets, different client interactions. They approach problems from different angles. They may sit on different floors, different buildings, or even different firms. And, typically, the biggest communication between the teams is a handoff from one to the next.

Great Strategy Doesn’t Always Lead to Great Creative

Sometimes, strategy is too cerebral. Sometimes, it tries to appease too many business needs. Sometimes, it just isn’t bold or incisive enough. And if strategy doesn’t strike a strong emotional chord, it often ends up sitting on a shelf­ as an academic exercise that people don’t know what to do with.

But when creative lacks strategic direction, although it may be beautifully designed and visually stunning, it risks addressing the wrong problem, the wrong audience, or the wrong objective. And if designers can’t find inspiration in the strategy, they will search for it somewhere else.

A Collective Endeavor

Bringing strategy and design together means thinking of it as a collective endeavor, not a linear process. It sounds easy in words, but putting it into practice takes commitment from everyone involved. As an agency who has been fusing design and strategy from the start, here’s how we do it.

  1. Bring design and strategy together, from the outset.
    We involve our design team in client interviews, workshops, and presentations, even when creative is far away from starting. Being integrated into early-stage strategic work helps designers understand the project and the process deeply. Our strategists work side by side with designers on creative – brainstorming, concepting, and elevating the design with on-strategy copy.
  2. One table, one team.
    We bring the entire team together around one table throughout the project. Each mode of thinking informs, respects, and challenges the other. A difference of perspectives and backgrounds elevates all of our work and challenges us to push our limits.
  3. Strategy guides, creative expresses.
    There’s a yin-yang to the process. Even when the two are in balance, we designate clear roles for everyone. We play to the strengths of each individual and build the team around people, not necessarily roles.
  4. Enjoy the journey.
    One of the great joys of a project is seeing a brand come to life strategically and experientially. Understanding how strategy and design build off each other to create that magic is energizing, and what ultimately brings us into work every day.

Smart Clients Want Both

For our clients, the results of this approach are energizing and empowering. Campaigns have a greater impact because they connect strategically and emotionally. Brands have a cohesive expression and articulation across every touchpoint. Identity projects, websites, and product launches are smarter because they tie together rationally and emotionally. When strategy and design both emotionally connect, great brands come to life in new, exciting, and surprising ways.

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

What Does the Agency of the Future Look Like?

Posted on by Chris Ames

Last week, Emotive Brand celebrated its ten-year anniversary. Naturally, the milestone has led all of us here to reflect on the last decade and ask what it will take to continue to be successful moving forward. Today, Founding Partner and Chief Strategy Officer Tracy Lloyd and Creative Director Thomas Hutchings tackle that very question. What does the agency of the future look like? How does it behave? And how do we continue to push the envelope of what’s possible?

How have you seen the agency space shift over time?

Thomas Hutchings: Gone are the days of real arrogance, where an agency could rest prim and proper on its name alone. In the beginning, when there was far less competition, you could get away with being very demanding and say to clients, ‘It’s our way or the highway.’ Now, the space is so diverse and versatile, agencies try to provide the best experience possible. It’s a much more malleable and friendly relationship where you really immerse yourself in the client world. Keeping those worlds separate is an old way of thinking. In a sense, it’s kind of reversed: the agency is now the client and the client is now the agency. In addition, there’s been an increase in robust in-house teams that are strong, educated, talented, and bring something to the table. Perhaps some would see that as intimidating, but I think it’s great. We seek to inspire one another and be an extension of your team.

Tracy Lloyd: It’s a much more agile relationship that agencies are having with clients. There has been a shift from agencies dictating how long a project will take to the client driving the time frame. And at the same time, the problems agencies are being asked to solve are getting more complex. No longer are agencies able to lean on old methodologies. Solving the business problems of high-growth companies today requires having the right frameworks that can be adapted in real-time to keep pace. It’s about leaving your ego at the door and acknowledging that our clients are sophisticated, educated, and have a lot of the same skills agencies have. You must be prepared to be collaborators – not dictators.

What’s the value of bringing in an outside agency?

TH: While brands and their in-house teams have definitely become more robust, agencies will always bring a lot of muscle to the game for one key reason. Brands are cursed with having to focus on themselves 100% of the time. We have the privilege of working on so many different projects across a myriad of verticals. We have a 360-degree view of the landscape and can leverage solutions from other fields or spaces. That’s a very unique power.

TL: We are asked to solve some tough business, product, and brand problems for our clients. As an agency, we bring a very senior team that not only dedicates time to fix those problems but solve them in unique ways. You need that outside perspective, that diversity of thinking, and that unique pool of talent that agencies bring in order to see the problem for what it is. It’s the fastest way to ascertain the strategic shifts you need to make to get back on the right track.

What have you been most surprised by?

TH: It’s been fascinating to see the small to medium-sized agencies become the new champions of this era. They are the ones getting the big clients, and the giant branding firms are wondering where they sit in this space. It’s almost akin to what’s happening in the retail space, with big box stores versus small independently-owned businesses focusing on experience. Clients are looking for the weird and the wonderful – not just the cold, stark efficiency of a massive branding firm. The agencies that create brands that actually mean something, rather than just exist and churn, will be the ones that survive in the long run.

TL: We work with mostly B2B brands. I think there are some B2B companies that are raising the stakes. The branding out there is getting more interesting, more experimental, and less corporate. That’s really nice to see. With the bloom of smaller digital agencies, there is a lot more competition out there – but I think it’s incredibly inspiring. I feel energized and inspired by our peers and am happy to be pushing the envelope of what’s possible alongside them. I think this year will be revolutionary for what we will see from B2B brands and the agencies that serve them.

What does the agency of the future look like?

TL: Agile. Smart. Nimble. Focused. I think the agency of the future, especially those agencies that work with B2B brands, will be two-fold. First, they will be the ones who can bring the same level of strategic problem solving and creativity of B2C agencies. And second, they will be known for developing those big ideas that create new categories, new markets, new revenue models, and build brands that people want to buy, work for, and talk about. That’s the agency of the future we are trying to build.

TH: The best agencies are the ones that keep their minds open and are willing to take a brand into any avenue. The more you pigeonhole, the more stagnant your agency will be. That’s easier said than done. Much of that comes down to surrounding yourself with people who have a natural hunger for curiosity. Those who ask, ‘What if it went there? Why can’t we do this?’ You need to embrace a challenger mindset to upset preconceived notions and conventions if you want to make something that really resonates.

If you could start over and build from this agency from scratch, is there anything you’d do differently?

TL: This is a hard one to answer. In many ways, we are doing the same things we’ve always done, just on a bigger scale. Our clients are the C-suite. The companies are bigger, global, and recognizable by name. The stakes are higher, and our team is more senior. But in principle, we are operating the same way. The tenets of Emotive Brand have always been about finding the perfect blend of emotional and rational strategies to help change how people feel about the brand and to ensure they are activated in the ways business need.

We’ve worked hard to make the experience clients have with our agency different in every way. We’ve used our own methodology to deliver on that, and every employee from day one knows how to deliver on that. I’m glad we were clear from the start, and I’m proud to know it still drives our behavior as an agency today. We continue to lean into a sales-led approach to solving positioning and go-to-market strategies for our technology clients because that’s just how my brain works. And it’s working. Our references are not just CMOs and CEOs – CROs love us, too. As an agency, it’s helped us become recognized as a go-to B2B branding agency. And that means something to me. Because delivering growth is how our clients measure our success, and theirs.

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

Image credit

Branding in Motion: A Roundtable with the Emotive Brand Design Team

Posted on by Chris Ames

In 2019, everything is alive. We communicate in GIFs, message effects, and video chats. Billboards are digital, bus ads are responsive, push notifications are synchronized. Give a glossy magazine to any child under five and chances are they will try to “scroll down” the page with one index finger.

The most forward-thinking companies are using motion – whether through kinetic type, animation, or mixed reality like AR and VR – to broaden the emotional impact of their brand. I sat down with the creative team at Emotive Brand to discuss the link between motion and emotion, and how B2B brands should be thinking about enhancing their digital experiences.

First off, what’s your role and how do you think about motion in your work?

Tracy Lloyd, Founding Partner: At Emotive Brand, we’re constantly thinking about how a brand behaves in space – whether that space is their category, the online space in which they appear, or the space they are trying to hold in peoples’ hearts and minds. In the beginning, motion used to be considered something only the cool kids could implement. Today, on the user side, motion is absolutely expected – yet you still see some B2B brands that are hesitant to wield it. Our job is to show them how motion can be an incredible activation tool for a brand to stand out in a crowded digital environment. Anything that evokes stronger feelings will create a stronger connection between brands and the people that use them.

Thomas Hutchings, Creative Director: Motion is adding another dimension, another layer, a new way of seeing. It’s activating another part of the senses, and when it comes to creating a brand, why would you deny that? Anything that has motion triggers a new sense or emotion in your mind. When things are static, they can lack empathy. Even a subtle amount can add so much. I almost think of it as another crayon in the box – maybe even the white crayon. It’s the one that B2B clients might not specifically request, but once it gets layered it, the end result is more rich and complex.

Keyoni Scott, Designer: I think of motion as a way to enhance any experience. In college, I studied film and media production, and I tend to approach design from the perspective of a filmmaker. Films are all about evoking emotion. Whatever movie you see, you at least want to walk away having felt something. Learning the ins and outs of how directors use motion for storytelling and to spark emotion was very influential for me, and it’s something I try to apply to design.

Alberto Carvajal, Senior Product Designer: For me, motion gives meaning. From a UX perspective, you think of all the different ways in which motion can create interactions or open new doors for users. It activates and brings to life otherwise flat objects – whether it’s from full-blown animation or a simple playfulness using parallax perspective. From apps and pages to the way we communicate with our team, motion opens, activates, and gives meaning.

In our work, we often partner with B2B brands that don’t have as much creative freedom as their B2C counterparts. If they use motion, it is usually relegated to an explainer video. How would you approach incorporating motion in a more holistic way to enhance their digital brand?

TL: I think the creative difference between B2B and B2C is a false limitation that brands put upon themselves. Whether you’re selling to businesses or to customers, people make decisions based off of emotion, creativity, and experience. There is a massive opportunity here for those B2B brands that are willing to invest and investigate better ways of telling their story to their target audience.

TH: Limiting your creative approach, in the beginning, is like eliminating a muscle before you even try using it. If you’re a brand today, think of how difficult it is to be unique and differentiated in this market. Everything has been created already, but it’s through layers and execution that you get at truly unique combinations. Motion is another way of getting at the unique layer of a brand. To B2B brands, I say this: don’t limit your brand on the basis of tradition. Brands shouldn’t have any limits for where they can go in vehicles of delivery. They should be able to flex in any space. Why would you ever want to limit the strength of a brand?

What are some gorgeous examples of motion that you love?

AC: In terms of a studio I look up to, DIA is doing amazing work bringing motion and kinetic systems to the branding world. They were the ones behind the latest Squarespace identity. The way they convey meaning through motion is amazing.

TH: DIA took a higher-level concept of space and did it very simply, without too many bells and whistles. It’s literally a square in space, but the velocity of it adds so many levels. When I think about a fully immersive experience, I can’t help but think of teamLab. There’s such a high level of curiosity, wondering exactly what will react with you and what you can inform.

AC: OMSE is another studio exploring motion through different layers, apps, and experimental open spaces. Agenda 2020 was an exhibition exploring the graphic possibilities enabled by emerging technology, from variable fonts to augmented reality.

TH: With every technological jump, all we’re doing is finding new ways to make emotions even more powerful. I can’t even imagine what brands will look like in ten years’ time, or the innovative ways they will implement to spark feeling. All I know is that the brands that will stick around in your mind will be the ones willing to take risks.

To learn more about how your brand can use motion to elevate emotion, contact Founding Partner Tracy Lloyd at [email protected].

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

Image credit: David Urbinati
Video credit: Sascha Lobe, DIA, OMSE