Brand Creation

My notes on brand creation

Iterating is really important
Innovation is 50% vision and 50% technology
Study the structure of the game your entering intensively
The more time you spend the better the end product (1-3 months)
Even if you find something great early. keep going. you will find something better
Hit pintrest and insta and dribbble every day every night
When you hit research saturation in one direction, explore others. embrace dead ends, they are valuable findings for making connections in later stages in the exploration.

Figuring out personality / vision / direction / mood

This one is really hard. And requires a lot of both shallow and deep research. the 80/20 rule definitely applies here. Most of the time it’s going down dead-end rabbit holes (80% of the time). But it’s important because in the later stages you will have acquired a mental map of what not to do. To quote Thomas Edison: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” As a result it will be faster to find the most optimal solution later. And finally when that amazing idea seem to come out of no where. It’s because of this research marathon and all the grinding / failing.
You have to immerse your self in a lot of data. competitors, state of the industry, state of the adjacent industry. broadening your map of the subject and adjacent subjects to the max. This is key to understanding what you want to build. Your inventing the future and so at the very least you have to understand the past and the present. And how to avoid just making what has been.

Once you understand the overall direction

Try to figure out the beginning. the point where it starts. From there everything should deterministically unfold it self. Seed -> Seedling -> plant - > Tree -> Forest. wrong seed, wrong forest
Quantity is key. From quantity you can better reach quality. Get as many associated keywords and theme keywords down on paper as you can. Keep expanding related keywords and start to combine names and words to generate ideas. The human brain is terrible at coming up with new ideas, so using addition and subtraction is a great tool to discover revelations. Mark the most relevant words and try to make them work with the direction you picked. Try to envision the brand in the context of URL, Mark, Name, Product.

When you have direction, name, and notion of a mark

Try to create sub directions of the core direction. like: geometrical, abstract, wavy, pulsing, recursive, revolving
Begin to iterate the mark / logo. Create a variation matrix. 8x4 grid of marks of the same idea but slightly different. 4 sub directions. Pick the best one and keep trying to make that better a few times 4-8 variations. Then pick the best of that. Now it’s near all that it can be.

Now its time to create a website.

Make the most stripped down version you can
Add only the most essential parts. top 3 things.
You can add more cruft later when you have more feedback
Adding too much upfront will limit your ability to iterate in the right direction (very important)

It will be hard but you will be able to create something others easily cant. they will want to copy you.
The reason why you should iterate and avoid planing too far, is because of the spaghetti experiment. If you give spaghetti-sticks and gum to kids. With iterating and learning they will build a better structure than MBA executives trying to plan and execute.
Everything is a scientific process. your job is just to apply it.
Compose website copy from keywords, create an extensive keyword map of the subject you want to write about.

Brand creation