What’s on the outside counts, too!

Two years ago, I made an incred­ibly rash decision. I was standing in front of a row of boxes, a little worse for wear due to an excess of cel­eb­ra­tion the prior evening. A sick feeling settled over me, and I decided to run with the impulse.

Two hours later, I was a blonde. (Actu­ally, this isn’t true. It took more like the entire weekend and six boxes of bleach to get there, which ulti­mately des­troyed my hair and left me with no option but cut­ting it all off, even­tu­ally, but that’s another story.) For me, it was a massive change, as I’ve always been prone to identify myself by my hair­colour. People often know me as the girl with lots of bright red hair (admit­tedly, I’m still working on get­ting the “lots” part back), and all the varied pre­con­cep­tions and ste­reo­types people have about red­heads tend to apply to me, too. (Whether that’s an issue of nature or nur­ture, I’m not quite sure, but let’s assume it’s irrelevant.)

So going blonde was def­in­itely an impulsive choice, and part of my desire to do so was to play with my own sense of self. It was fun for a while (mostly because I’d show up places to see friends, and they’d look quite shocked), but even­tu­ally I went back to some­thing akin to my nat­ural colour (after testing out almost every other colour com­bin­a­tion avail­able to me. Ser­i­ously, it’s no wonder my hair ended up des­troyed).  The exper­i­ment led me to realize just how much of who we are—both how we see ourselves, and how others see ourselves—is encap­su­lated in our appear­ance. As much as we may try insist on silly maxims like “don’t judge a book by its cover” and “it’s what’s on the inside the counts”, what’s on the out­side is almost invari­ably a reflec­tion of what’s on the inside.

Some­times people try to tell me that design isn’t important, because if you sell a product or ser­vice that’s good enough, people will flock to it regard­less of how it’s pack­aged. To some extent, this is true; how­ever, to a more rel­evant extent, it isn’t true. Good design trans­lates the “what’s inside” stuff and puts it on the out­side. It extracts the not­able ele­ments of whatever you’re selling and dis­plays it in a visual form, in much the same way that my having red hair says “I’m ener­getic and a little bit mad”. Design is always relevant—not because it fals­i­fies a product, but rather because it presents it in an optimal light.

Part of the reason I love working with star­tups is because we get to develop branding from the ground-up—start with a clean slate. Typ­ic­ally this will start with logo devel­op­ment, which is the central axis of the overall brand, and thus a highly important ele­ment. I find that, regard­less of the ser­vice or product being branded, invari­ably ele­ments of the person behind it become tangled into the mes­sage: their colour pref­er­ences, their fond­ness for cer­tain ele­ments, the fact that they like cats. In the past, I’ve typ­ic­ally tried to direct people away from this kind of thinking (just because you like lilies doesn’t mean that your sewage-treatment com­pany should use a lily in its logo) but I’m begin­ning to believe that this is no longer as valid an argu­ment as it once was.

I had my logo tat­tooed to my shoulder blade a few years ago, when I was just starting out. People kept asking me: “What hap­pens if the busi­ness fails?” and I’d respond with “well, I’d have a reminder of a crazy ven­ture I under­took!”. Of all my tat­toos, it’s the one I’m the least likely to ever regret. Also note that my own branding was based, in part, out of a fond­ness for sparks, ampersands, and and Old-West aesthetic.

Invari­ably, as trends shift towards a focus on the person behind the busi­ness, rather than a cor­por­a­tion as a face­less iden­tity, who you are is an integral part of who your busi­ness is, and thus it’s rel­evant that you like cats. (And I’m sorry for saying it wasn’t!)

Starting a busi­ness is such a per­sonal ven­ture anyway, and you put so much of your­self into the pro­cess, that what res­ults is inher­ently ties to who you are anyway.

So: dress like your web­site. Dye your hair the colour of your logo. Throw your cats in there, so long as you can find a way to make it rel­evant. Embrace the parts of your­self that your audi­ence will respond to, and make your busi­ness, and your brand, a part of yourself.

Tags: business, consistency, design, life, logos, style