Trail maintenance
The next time you roll your eyes at brand guidelines, you might consider a different mental model for what they help the enterprise accomplish.
There are loads of books about what it takes to craft a great brand identity. Start with Marty Neuemeier or Ries and Trout and go from there.
Those works will get you started and give you something to aspire to, but they will not get you through the day-to-day of working on a brand. Indeed, there isn’t much in my experience that’s geared toward the more practical drudgery. So, if you’re like me, you end up finding inspiration in odd corners.
For example, you might be listening to a design podcast about trails - as in trails through nature - and hear something that tracks closely with the life of a brand person.
“I think that the key aspect of a trail is that a trail is a line that evolves. It’s something that we follow–where each time you walk, you’re leaving a slight bit of yourself behind. And the next person who comes picks up on those signals that you’re leaving, and they leave their own signals. And over time, it keeps changing subtly. So, let’s say there’s a big curve in the trail, we’ll take the inside of that curve, and we’ll shave it down and shave it down until it’s a straight line. In a curious way, a trail is something that’s both terrestrial and liquid–and that’s what I find beautiful about them. Unlike roads, you know, or especially railways, which are so fixed–they’re laid down in an almost authoritarian way–a trail is very collaborative and organic.”
That’s author Robert Moore on the podcast 99 Percent Invisible. And over here is me - a dyed-in-the-wool, experienced brand person - trying to think of a better metaphor for what it is to work on a brand every day, and coming up with blanks.
We talk a lot about guidelines in the brand world, but the reality is that most people hear the word guidelines and interpret it as rules. Rules, in turn, mean rigidity - things you can’t do without getting your hand slapped. And sure, that is a component of establishing brand guidelines. There have to be red lines, otherwise you have no brand identity at all.
But I’d encourage my colleagues across the broader enterprise to think of brand identity and the guidelines underpinning them as akin to a trail through the wilderness.
As a mental model, it might help you think a bit differently about what brand teams are trying to achieve and how to anticipate where their work will go next.
A trail, after all, is a path through the wilderness. It shuttles you toward a destination. There are sights you’ll want to stop and see along the way, and it’s almost never a good idea to stray from the path. But there’s also no one dictating every step you take. You might even be able to go off the trail and still get to where you are meant to go. And, as Moore says about trails, they “keep changing subtly.” A brand is never in stasis.
A brand is ever-changing, and it is so because of all of the people who interact with it, and in so doing shape and reshape it ad infinitum. Neuemeier is famous for saying that “a brand isn’t what you say it is, it’s what they think it is.” That sentiment captures the way that a brand can’t really be “owned” by a person or team. There are mindful, deliberate stewards to be sure, but there are hundreds or thousands of people changing its contours on a minute-by-minute basis.
One other metaphor I’ve used with my team comes from my avid tennis playing, and is usually brought up in moments of exasperation. When people cross one of those red lines of ours, I’ll compare it to someone changing the dimensions of a tennis court.
The thing about tennis - and most of our favorite sports - is that there aren’t actually as many rules as you think that pertain to what happens in between the lines. Sure, there’s a ton when it comes to scoring. There are even rules around what happens outside the lines - for example the amount of time you can sit down during a changeover. The actual gameplay, though, is quite simple.
The server has two chances to get the ball within the opponent’s service box. If successful, the opposing players hit the ball back and forth over a net and inside the lines, allowing for one bounce of the ball before it is returned. The person who fails first in their assignment loses the point.
The magic in tennis is in how the players accomplish their task. The constraints of the are few in number but critical to there being any magic at all. If you suddenly change the dimensions of the court or let people hit the ball after two bounces, you’re conjuring a different kind of magic and one that can no longer be described as “tennis.”
So it is with the brand guidelines you should probably go and reread now in a slightly different light. As you’re re-acquainting yourself with them, think of bucolic paths through the forest, waterfalls and vistas dotting the way to your final destination.
To create, one must be a critic
Part of being creative is honing your ability to critique - and that means engaging with popular works as much as it means what you’re actually working on.
I’m about a third of the way through Rick Rubin’s book The Creative Act: A Way of Being.
It’s great stuff in the spiritual sense. Rubin, who famously doesn’t know much about actually playing music and yet has collaborated with rock and hip-hop royalty to make music all the same, is full of all sorts of philosophical wisdom. I’m not sure I’d trust him with a grocery list, but he seems to understand and articulate well the big stuff - what it is to create, that create is a verb not a noun, that craft is perpetually in pursuit of what you can dream up, and so on.
I’ll probably have something longer to write when I’ve finished the book, but in the short-term, I wanted to share a favorite passage from what I’ve read so far.
In a chapter titled Submerge (The Great Works), Rubin says:
“The objective is not to learn to mimic greatness, but to calibrate our internal meter for greatness. So we can better make the thousands of choices that might ultimately lead to our own great work.”
Rubin is speaking of how we engage with great works of art, literature, music, film, and so on, and he is not really saying anything all that new. What is this sentiment, but a remix of and justification for the maxim that all artists steal.
Still, I loved seeing it written this way. I spend a not insignificant portion of my spare time engaging with the work of filmmakers. It might seem like a hobby, and it has often felt that way to me, but more and more it feels like an unpaid part of my work and craft. It seems more and more like something I need to do to keep making things and to eventually make something that might be great.
I don’t think I’ve ever met someone in my field who doesn’t have their own version of my side project. It might not come in the format of a blog or be oriented around cinema, but to a person they all have something like this in their life. If they didn’t - if I couldn’t eventually uncover what that thing was - I wouldn’t trust them as a creative professional.
And that’s because to be someone who makes things, you must engage actively - obsessively even - with how things get made. Understanding how things get made means grasping the balance between vision and execution. After all, an idea isn’t worth much until it can be brought to life - until an audience can engage with it.
There’s an episode in one of the last few seasons of Mad Men where Don Draper sneaks out of the office to go see the newly released film Planet of the Apes. The conventional reading of this behavior, given the context of the series, is that Don is once again skirting the rules and avoiding accountability. While the rest of his colleagues and underlings work, the mercurial genius is engaging in a form of selfish escape. Other days, it’s an extramarital affair or a three-martini lunch, but today it’s Charlton Heston.
I never felt that way about this particular sequence, though I would never argue with the idea that Don is selfish, aloof and generally unbound by common decency and consideration for others.
In this very specific case, I would argue Don was working, in a very loose sense of the word. In this line of work, even when you’re not in the process of making something, you’re in some process of tuning. Creativity is an act, yes, and, Rubin hints, it is a perpetual one.
Be a Kevin
The Valentine’s Day Bandit has a lesson for all of us about the way we should show up and how that relates to building a meaningful legacy.
Kevin Fahrman’s infamous red heart, seen around Portland, Maine for the last few decades.
You probably aren’t building a legacy, professionally or otherwise, that will register at all with anyone other than those with whom you have direct and regular contact. On the off chance that you are building something that will extend beyond your own circle, there’s a decent chance you won’t be alive to fully appreciate your impact.
That might sound like the most dour possible message, but this Valentine’s Day, I’m thinking of it in the exact opposite light.
Last April, Kevin Fahrman died. He was 67. His name didn’t mean much to me before then. But it took on great meaning starting last April because that’s when Kevin was revealed as the infamous Valentine’s Day Bandit here in Portland, Maine. Suddenly, us locals had a name to go with the red hearts that materialized across the city in stores and shop windows and everywhere else in between on the morning of Valentine’s Day for decades running.
Kevin Fahrman left a considerable legacy behind, and his tradition is set to carry on this year, the first without him. There’s a stark contrast between the reach and emotional resonance of his gesture and the complexity and ambition behind it. Put another way, Kevin’s particular brand of banditry had a narrow, simple, good-hearted focus and execution, which is probably why it was so wildly successful.
Take it from Kevin’s family, who is carrying on his tradition by encouraging us all to “Be A Kevin”:
“Every year for decades, all over the little town of Portland, Maine, he secretly put up bright red hearts just in time for Valentine’s Day, delighting everyone. His gesture of pure love was stealthy and mysterious. Totally anonymous. Tireless. Genuine. Heartfelt.”
If you’re wondering why I brought up the legacy word at the beginning of this post, there’s your explanation. For almost all of us here on Planet Earth, all we can really control is how we show up.
People might remember something we make or do - they might map a symbol like a red heart to us in their memory. But that symbol is just a shorthand for all of the emotion tied up in it. If we’re tireless and genuine and heartfelt, and we’re that way year after year, we’ll leave a lasting impact. The tangible things we build - the triumphs and failures - fade from memory quickly. The way you show up isn’t so temporal.
“It’s that process that is the magic”
An old Steve Jobs interview outlines why ideas on their own are overrated.
“Any idiot can have an idea.”
A trusted mentor/colleague/friend blurted this out in a meeting some time ago. He’s Italian, so the bombast of sentiment coupled with his distinctive accent must have made it that much more likely to be seared in my memory. Anyway, I can’t remember what we were discussing specifically, but I know that the general context was the ceaseless drumbeat of “input” you receive when you work on brand identity and in experience design.
It’s part of the deal when you create. You have to be brave enough to go through the act itself and then courageous enough after to hear what everyone else thinks about your brainchild. Some of what you hear will be valuable. A lot of it will not be. Even the good stuff might not be good in the way that someone articulates it to you. Sifting through it all and (hopefully) ending up somewhere even better is part of the work.
Last week, a very old interview with Steve Jobs crossed my LinkedIn feed and brought idiots and their ideas back to the top of my mind. You’ll grasp why in the first minute or so of the clip.
As a culture, we tend to celebrate ideas - that spark or moment of divine inspiration that started everything off. Who doesn’t love a good origin story that explains and imbues with deeper meaning subsequent exploits and achievements in a way that makes it all seem meant to be.
What both Jobs and my friend are saying in their own way is that ideas are wildly overrated. An idea is worth absolutely nothing without the ability to make it real and make it good. There are a lot of people who understand this either because they’ve actually made an idea real themselves or because they’ve worked with and respect people who can. But there are a lot of other people who think, as Jobs says, “that the idea is 90 percent of the work.”
Later on in the interview, Jobs speaks with the perspective of someone who has made an idea real before. “It’s that process that is the magic,” he says.
He’s right, of course. The big idea is vastly more simple to grasp and relate to, but there’s really no “magic” in the idea. That only comes when you close your mouth and roll up your sleeves.
“It’s a tough business”
The truth about agency life, from the mouth of a Methuselah-aged veteranl
"Old Port, Portland, Maine" by *rboed* is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
One weekend this summer, I was walking through the Old Port in Portland with my family. We turned the corner and happened upon an art gallery - the kind that gives the Old Port its considerable appeal, but also makes you wonder how rent can possibly be made given the real estate it occupies.
My oldest daughter begged us to go in, not that it’s a particularly hard thing for us to say yes to, and in we went.
The answer to how this particular place stays in business is one that I’ve found a bit haunting since our visit. As we learned, the owner and artist of this particular establishment made his fortune not through art but by selling his own advertising agency many, many years ago to a larger agency that is still around to this day.
That sale, it seems, can fund canvas and paint and prime real estate decades after the fact. If you don’t own your own agency and you’re having a lousy day, this particular revelation can be a bit chilling.
Having traded a few agency life stories, we started to wind down our visit, and the owner of the gallery reflected on his time in the industry.
“It’s a tough business,” he told me. Even all those years later, the time “in it” seems to have taken its toll. That’s not to say it’s a bad business, nor is it a complaint. But it is a fact of life if you’re in it, as I have been for almost a decade.
Life lessons from Giannis and Klopp
Wins and losses can convey great wisdom.
At the risk of sounding like an ex-jock*, I have to admit that I get a lot of inspiration and perspective for my day-to-day life from a handful of coaches and athletes.
* Having worked as a sportswriter for half a decade, I can counterbalance this by telling you that the vast majority of professional athletes, or at least baseball players, are absolutely and totally uninteresting in this regard. Really, you wouldn’t want to have a conversation about the weather with most of them.
So, yes, of course I love this now-viral clip from Giannis Antetokounpmo on whether his now-concluded season was a failure because he didn’t reach the NBA Finals again.
“Every year, you work toward something, towards a goal … it’s not a failure.” he says. “It’s steps to success - there’s always steps to it.”
This is such uncommon wisdom - not just for a basketball player in his 20s, but for anyone of any age working in any profession. It’s tempting to think that a white-collar corporate job is different. It is not the same zero-sum game as the NBA playoffs after all. But just because there isn’t a final score on ESPN after you close your laptop every night doesn’t mean we shouldn’t all be trying to embrace Giannis’ mentality.
I’d go perhaps a step farther. Success in the context of wins and losses are not any sort of valuable end goal at all. Getting better - taking those steps every day - is the only goal that really matters.
It reminded me of Liverpool coach Jurgen Klopp’s perspective on success and what he hopes to remember when he’s 90. It’s not lifting the cup in triumph. It’s all the details and small moments along the way.
The ultimate sports philosopher, of course, is John Wooden, whose book Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections On and Off the Court is one I turn to on an almost weekly basis.
Wooden tells us: “Success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best you are capable of becoming.”
In other words, only you can really know if you’re successful because true success is derived from knowing you gave everything you had. No one else has the answers on this matter.
“There is no substitute for empathy”
You can teach a lot, but not everything.
Pete Souza, who was the Chief White House Photographer during Barack Obama’s presidency, utters this simple, powerful phrase during a new documentary about his work, titled The Way I See It.
I covered the film side of this over at my other Internet home, but I had to pluck this pearl of wisdom out and bring it over here. I am sure Souza isn’t the first person to utter this sentiment. How could he possibly be? Even so, I think it’s worth hearing.
Souza is speaking of Obama, and, of course, contrasting him to President Trump, but he could also be talking about himself. Or you. Or me.
You can have all the skills, and money, and power in the world, and it will always go to waste if you don’t see and seek out humanity. It’s all that connects us, after all.