Most brand strategy documents get read once and filed. That usually gets taken as proof the strategy was a waste of money. It is better evidence that the wrong thing was written down. A brand strategy is not a mission statement. It is not a page of values pulled from...
Most businesses approach brand positioning backwards. The instinct is to widen: describe the work in terms broad enough that nobody feels excluded, list every service on offer, choose a name and a look that would sit comfortably beside any competent competitor in the...
Most businesses assume a style guide is something only large companies need — a thick binder of rules nobody reads, built for teams big enough to lose track of their own branding. That assumption costs small businesses more than they realize. A style guide is not...
The instinct when a brand starts to feel stale is to scrap the whole thing and start over. Sometimes that is genuinely the right call. More often, it is the expensive version of a fix that a much smaller move would have solved. Knowing the difference saves real money...
A logo is not a brand identity. It is one piece of one, and businesses that treat the two as interchangeable usually end up with a mark they like but a brand that does not actually function anywhere else — not on a website, not in a proposal, not in the room where a...
The Alder Files was built on a different premise: restraint is not the absence of design. It is the discipline of design. Knowing what to cut is a harder skill than knowing what to add, and it is the skill that separates brands people trust from brands people scroll...
