Why Branding is Like Riding a Bicycle
The old adage is once you learn to ride a bicycle, you never really forget and you can hop back on at any time in your life and go. This is not at all what I mean when I say branding is like riding a bicycle. While it’s true you never forget, the challenge of branding is unique to each project and your comprehension of the brand or product is usually all wobbly and hard to steer straight without zooming headlong into a pile of gravel and scraping the ever-loving crap out of your knee. This metaphor is especially true for startups, so let’s get into it, shall we.
In March I was brought on board to steer the creative helm for a cool new company called Giftly. What is Giftly? Glad you asked, here’s the snippet from our How It Works page: Think of a Giftly like the cooler, more sophisticated, and smarter cousin to the gift card. You personalize and customize it, choosing where it works and how it looks. And you can send it via email, Facebook, or even by regular mail! It takes everything easy and reliable about gift cards, but makes for a vastly cooler and more personal gift. In other words: the Internet is finally making gifting awesome.
Our product is, in my opinion, breaking new ground in the most basic terms regarding money transfers, and is providing people with a whole new form of gift-giving. Needless to say, branding a concept that doesn’t really exist in the world currently can end up being somewhat of a trial-and-error process that takes awhile to materialize correctly.
When I was hired at Giftly, I needed to create a look and feel that blended the relatively old concept of giving gifts with the new idea of receiving a sum of money on their own credit card, activated via geo-location (e.g. actually going to the place the giver suggested to receive the money). To me, gifts elicit Christmases and birthdays past, a nostalgic trip with fancy wrapping papers and old yellowed photographs of happy people opening presents. Gifts remind you of the people who gave you the treasure with all sorts of memories attached that pull at your heart strings. I scoured through old catalogs and vintage magazines for ads selling goods of yesteryear and knew that this warm, old-timey feel was perfect for Giftly.
So I went to work picking a warm color palette reminiscent of the Atomic Age, the muted print style of old Sears & Roebuck catalogs and soft, yellowed newsprint of the 50s and 60s. I tried working with a few typefaces for the Giftly logo, and ultimately threw them all out for a completely hand-drawn creation, akin to the way type was more or less illustrated for paste-ups that would be photographed for advertisements. I sprinkled in some Futura to nicely couple with the hand rendered style to top off the look of that era. My mind was zeroed in on decades past to create the style for our ‘new-fashioned way of gifting.’
I spent the next few months shaping and molding every element of Giftly, bouncing between stylistic elements on the site and illustration motifs and while the overall presence of the site was generally appealing (albeit ‘washed-out’ according to some, but the subdued colors help the bright UI components like buttons and calls to action pop, in my defense), nothing seemed to fit together cohesively. And so our company wobbled along on this rickety framework that would get updated in a piecemeal fashion with every new iteration. With each mockup I created I was racking my brain to achieve the right gestalt to make the site flow together as one beautiful piece, one page to the next. In essence, I had created the right pieces, but the puzzle had become a jumbled mess that wouldn’t stick together. I was becoming increasingly frustrated by my own lack of visual vision.
To help calm me down and gain perspective on the iterative process that drives the core of any good startup, I started digging through the archives of my Yelp mockups from 2005. I spent 4 1/2 years as Creative Director at the review site where I cut my teeth on the interface design. Previously my background was as an art director at an ad agency where I specialized in marketing and visual design – I had stumbled into new territory moving out to the west coast. And to make matters worse, our Product Manager had quit a few weeks into my tenure, so I was tasked with fighting the usability fight alongside our CEO, Jeremy Stoppelman (while not a bad arrangement, this wasn’t the ideal situation). The hundreds of mocks I sifted through in my archives eerily paralleled the evolution I was experiencing at Giftly. The garish yellow gradients in the headers and the blinding red outlines of Yelp glaringly showed how naive I was to the brand early on in the process. But similar to Giftly, we were building a new service for users from scratch (crowdsourced reviews were fairly uncommon at the time). I had vacillated the very same way through the design process and it took a whole year to get on solid brand footing.
I was six years younger then, so perhaps the struggle didn’t aggravate my sensibilities the way it has as of late. Or maybe the success of the site and the subsequent years with a solid foundation underneath me had spoiled me in some way. In any case, I had a breakthrough at Giftly with the look and feel when, at one point, I became too busy to design one small section of our site, the jobs page. Our Product Manager, Mills Baker, took on the relatively simple, yet instrumental task in designing a page to announce our open positions. He deliberately rearranged the pieces of my puzzle to fit a new aesthetic that I was unable to see, and blew the doors open for all of the visual details to fit into place. We had finally achieved balance and were ready to coast in the right direction. This revelation was exciting and allowed our mockups to breathe life into all sorts of new solutions.
It’s funny how myopic you can be when you work on a singular project and how the everyday duties of your job can keep you locked into one way of designing. The ease of implementing old visual elements, no matter how wrong for the brand, seem to outweigh the innovative techniques you could be experimenting on. I also cannot stress enough how important leaning on key team members is to moving the brand forward. No designer is an island, and landing on an airtight brand is always a group effort. I like to think of part of my job as being a medium, channeling the perception of my coworkers into a workable whole, you just have to be open to hearing what they have to say and transform those tidbits into a flexible design.
The world of Giftly finally feels locked in to me now, and I feel as if my instincts are ticking the right way somehow. Both experiences seem to share the bicycle analogy and the story of how my agitation lifted and am free to move forward with confidence. Remember to just keep pedaling, and be sure to have an eye out for the potholes.
