Some of the most sophisticated clients we work with show up with their “brand” already in hand. Ahead of the first call they send a PDF with logo lockups, a palette, two typefaces, and a page on voice with a few adjectives on it, plus a note saying the brand side is handled and they need help with everything else.
That’s a style guide, and often a very good one. It tells you exactly what the company looks like and close to nothing about who it is. Almost everyone treats those as the same document. A brand is absolutely not a style guide, and it’s a hill I will die on.
I understand the confusion, because in 2015 we were the ones handing those PDFs over. Hoot sold logos and websites as tactics with nothing underneath them. We didn’t ask who a company was before we started drawing, and we let clients run the process because it felt like good service. One logo went through eight rounds of revisions.
The phrase we heard most in those years was “I’ll know it when I see it.”
Clients meant it as deference to the designer. It played out like commissioning a portrait and declining to sit for it: the painter guesses, the client stands behind the easel saying not quite, and eight rounds later there’s an “ok” but vague picture.
You’ll know it when you see it because our job is to hold up a mirror, likely a mirror you are incapable of holding.
A logo is the easiest part of a brand to make, which is why everyone wants to start there, and why the Brand Being Method™ starts with Brand Heart instead: the promise a company makes and the principles it agrees to keep when keeping them is inconvenient.
A style guide can tell a new hire which red to use. It can’t tell her whether to push back when a client wants the scope doubled by Friday. Those calls get made dozens of times a day by people who will never open the PDF, and when nothing written covers them, people borrow from the last place they worked, or their own personal values.
The company starts to sound like everyone’s previous employer, and its campaigns come back on palette and on font while saying nothing that moves the needle.
Companies are now handing their brand guidelines to AI to write their emails and proposals.
Given a style guide, a model produces work in the right colors with nothing underneath it, at volume.
The Brand Being Method™ codifies the heart and the mind its AI will run on, and most companies haven’t aligned on what that is.
Hoot stopped selling the logo first a long time ago.
We still make logos. It’s the last thing we draw now, after the client has sat for the portrait.
