Musing: Why are companies so obsessed with their rebrands? Are birthday parties an extrovert conspiracy?
Rebrand joy makes sense to me at last. Also, an experiment with party-less celebration.
Musing 1 of 2:
When a company rebrands, there’s a predictable script: the process was so DEEP and MEANINGFUL. They LOVE their new logo, they feel their prospective customers will UNDERSTAND them more readily with their new visual identity. They have some new swag now, and if they sell physical objects, they can’t wait for you to hold the new packaging so you can admire it too.
After living through a bewildering accounting firm rebrand early in my career, I’m especially inclined to roll my eyes about these things. I almost always prefer the old branding to the new, because I share the general human bias in favor of the familiar. I wonder how much of the enthusiasm is self-justification of the money spent. I wonder if rebrands are just marketing folks justifying their existence.
None of this jaded skepticism stopped me from creating a “(XL) Proper visual brand identity” category in my business YNAB Wish Farm a few months into its existence. I low-key loathed my DIY pixel-art logo as soon as I decided it was good enough. My brand colors were fine, Inter is a fine font family, I made my own style guide and used it diligently. And I kept stashing dollars in that category with the promise that I wouldn’t have to live with what I’d made forever.
I started researching graphic designers once I’d spent a couple of years building up the visual identity category balance. I talked to other business owners with logos I liked. (Thank you to everyone who was frank about their budgets and their experience when I asked!) Over 70% of the brands I asked had logos designed by a talented employee or family member who was ‘not a designer’. I asked designer friends whose work they admired and why. I learned about visual branding.
I thought hard about why I wanted to pay for professional help. Mostly it’s because I spend more time than I would ever have guessed updating webpages with the logo on them and sending links to those pages; I want something that doesn’t make me wince a little every time I do that. I got to the stage of talking to designers about their branding philosophy and pricing five times and walked away each time because the vibe or the price was way off.
I started to wonder if I was the problem, before it dawned on me that yes. Yes, I was. I was talking to cream-of-the-crop designers, but I wanted the professional version of a good-enough logo and visual brand. I wanted someone who cared about their craft, but didn’t take it so seriously. I’m trying to build a company that can pay me $24,000/year for working an erratic very part time schedule. That’s not a company with award-winning design, that’s a company with a designer who is pragmatic about a lower tier service for a micro business.
The sixth designer I talked to had that. I hired her for a tiny pilot project (converting my DIY logo to a vector file) to see if we had compatible communication styles. We did. A little light bonding over the kerning problems I’d made for myself later, and I was sure I’d found The One. I wandered off to work up a language and writing style guide and customer archetypes for The Friendly Spreadsheet with a separate pro, then came back with that in hand to settle in on the visual identity.
Now that the logo is done (though not yet live): I think I can explain the rebrand obsession. Especially as a single-decision-maker-sized business, I’m deep in the weeds on EVERYTHING. A bazillion decisions need to be made, and I make all of them, and nearly all of them in isolation.
Working on the logo is the first time someone else has been as interested in my brand identity as I am. The first time I’ve been able to say, “close, but can you somehow figure out how to make it more _____” without also being the person who needs to figure it out. I’m obsessed with my new branding because it was my first time collaborating on the tiny decisions about how my business presents to the world. Look, I unfortunately have very specific visual taste about word forms as a result of my hand lettering hobby. It felt like nothing less than magic to have someone else CARE about the proportions of white space around the business name I adore.
Every time I look at my new logo (and the other visual goodies), that good collaboration feeling is going to be part of what I see. Every time I looked at my DIY logo, the struggle of wrestling Procreate with minimal vision echoed through me. Of course I’m going to want to tell you about how great the new new is! Of course other companies, after having a designer listen hard to them and turn that into visuals that commemorate the experience of being listened to, also want to tell me about it!
Related: the next Friendly Spreadsheet Update email is probably going to be gushing about the new logo. But hey, at least now you know why.
Musing 2 of 2:
Are parties as the default way to celebrate milestones an extrovert conspiracy? For my 40th birthday earlier this week, I decided to try something different. I’d budgeted $700 to do something extravagant like take friends to a craft class, and then realized I just wasn’t excited about doing ANYTHING as a group. I wanted to have a very special day mostly by myself. Here’s the breakdown of what I did/spent:
Accoutrements ($230.98):
$199.00 Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition in metallic teal (unlike my beloved Kindle Oasis, this model is waterproof!)
$16.99 Kindle handle case for easier one-handed reading
$14.99 Kindle sleeve for protecting the screen
Experiences ($153.67):
$100.00 Three hour soak at Cascada in NE Portland
$50.87 Three Lyft rides for east-west connections awkward on TriMet
$2.80 Tri-Met fare for the easy connection
$0.00 Ten Ways to Accidentally Fall in Love by Emmy Sanders (included in Kindle Unlimited), which I spent the day savoring
Festive food ($248.83):
$6.75 Latte and Ocean Roll (plus journaling) at Stumptown Coffee. I happened to have a full beverage punch card, so the drink was free. All earlier versions of me are shocked about how happy I was to be at a coffee shop at 7 am on my birthday. (I think in any prior year I would have kicked off my celebration by sleeping in until 11.)
$14.40 Gorgeous broth + boosters for lunch at Lucky Soup after my soak. This is a take-out-only joint, but I dressed in rain gear so I could sip in their courtyard. Then the skies obligingly paused the rain for me!
$11.50 Macaron snack at Champagne Poetry. The Thai Tea remains my favorite, but their new Yuzu flavor is a solid challenger. Bailed on my planned Japanese Garden visit and took the bus home to finish my book and have a nap with cats/let my rain gear dry.
$65.00 Custom surprise-flavor birthday cake from TumTum bakery.
$151.18 Dinner for two at Xiao Ye, where they also took on cutting and serving the cake.
Total: $633.48 (a bit under budget due to free latte, two fewer Lyft legs than I planned, and no admission charge for skipped Garden visit)
Reflections: weather aside, this was a perfect day for me. (Ideally one’s birthday out and about is not the third day in a row with at least ¾” of rain, but as a native Portlander, I’ve learned how to have a good time in rainy weather.) I did some writing, then read an especially delightful book in a series of warm places, got snuggles from all three cats and my partner, and ate all manner of extravagantly delicious things. The waterproof Kindle will persist for years, and I feel very clever for imbuing something I’ll use often with a bunch of good memories of this day.
For my fellow introverts who have also spent a lot of time figuring out how to have nice small gatherings, but are still depleted afterward: I loved this for me. I definitely think it’s worth experimenting with a mostly-solo celebration to see if you love it too.
POV: Your cake is also ART. See professionally lit shot here.
I’ll be back with more musings next month!
Kat