From graphic designer to brand consultant: what changed?

You may say to yourself, how did I get here…

I didn’t decide to become a brand consultant. Thirty years of design experience gradually changed the questions I asked, and that took me upstream from execution to strategy.

When I started in graphic design more than 30 years ago, design was a craft that required a range of skills to execute a solution that today might seem relatively simple.

The brief was usually simple too: create a logo, design a brochure, develop some packaging or produce a campaign. The assumption was that the client had already thought about the objective, the audience, the tone of voice and the visual expression of the brand. Our job was to turn that thinking into something tangible.

But over time I became increasingly frustrated by the lack of distinctive thinking behind the work. There were visual differences, but the overarching feeling was often safe, predictable and risk-free.

So I started asking questions for myself:

What does this organisation actually stand for?

Who is it trying to reach? What makes it different?

Why should anyone believe in it? Why should they trust it?

And, from the design perspective, how do we express all of that consistently, convincingly and compellingly?

Over time those questions changed the way I approached the work.

When design meets strategy

This was happening at the same time as marketing itself was evolving.

When I started out, marketing was often closely associated with sales support, merchandising and literature. Over time it became a much more strategic discipline, with marketers increasingly responsible for positioning, research, customer insight and long-term brand development.

That evolution was important because it changed the relationship between marketing and design.

A marketing strategy can look perfectly convincing on paper. A brand positioning can sound compelling in a presentation. Purpose, vision and values can all seem relevant and coherent when they are written down.

But eventually those ideas have to become something that colleagues and customers actually experience and buy into.

They have to become tangible: a name, a visual identity, a website, packaging, advertising, social media, internal communications and all the other myriad ways an organisation presents itself to the world.

And that’s often where weaknesses in the thinking can become apparent.

If the proposition isn’t crystal clear, it’s difficult to express.

If the positioning is too similar to competitors, it’s difficult to create something distinctive.

If the brand is expressed differently across different channels, the lack of clarity becomes impossible to ignore.

Design is the point where strategy meets reality.

That means the designer is not simply taking a strategy and making it look good. They have to interrogate it, interpret it and sometimes challenge it before they can express it effectively.

That doesn’t make the designer a replacement for the marketer or the strategist, but it does give them a different perspective – one that comes from having to translate strategic thinking into something people can actually see, understand, relate to and interact with.

Why experience matters

Over the past 30 years, I’ve worked on hundreds of brands across a wide range of industries.

At first, we thought of ourselves simply as designers. We were excited by solving creative problems and producing work that looked good. But as the years went by, we began to pay much more attention to what happened after the design was delivered.

Did it make the proposition clearer?

Did it help the organisation differentiate itself?

Did it give people a better understanding of what the business stood for?

Did it create consistency across different communications?

And, ultimately, did it help the organisation achieve what it was trying to achieve?

That’s when I began to understand that design wasn’t simply about producing aesthetically pleasing work. It was about solving problems and achieving business objectives through creativity.

I often came across organisations that had lost sight of what originally made them distinctive. I saw beautifully designed identities undermined by inconsistent implementation. And I worked with established businesses that had evolved considerably while their brand remained stuck in the past.

That was not because someone had deliberately made a bad decision. It’s more likely the business had moved on while the brand hadn’t. Business carried on as usual, content was produced, campaigns created and communications published based on yesterday’s understanding of the organisation rather than where it wants to go tomorrow.

As an experienced designer I became particularly sensitive to the gap between what a brand says about itself and what people actually experience.

That gap matters because branding is ultimately about perception. It’s about the meaning people attach to an organisation and whether that meaning is consistent with what the organisation wants to stand for.

The designer as translator

 This is where I think the role of the brand consultant kicks in.

Part of the consultant’s job is translation.

The brand consultant translates business strategy into something people can recognise, understand and remember.

Traditionally, the designer has been responsible for the visual part of that translation. But after decades of doing it, I recognised that visual expression is only one part of the problem.

The words matter. The proposition matters. The tone of voice matters. The experience matters. And most of all, consistency matters.

 All of these things have to work together.

That’s why I don’t see brand consultancy as something separate from design. For me, it’s the natural progression from it.

Graphic design evolved into brand consultancy because the questions became bigger.

Instead of simply asking, “How should this look?”, I started asking, “What does this need to mean?”

Instead of asking, “What should we say?”, I wanted to understand what the organisation actually had to express.

And before recommending a solution, I wanted to understand the business behind the brief.

I haven’t stopped being a designer. If anything, the years have made me more interested in design. But I now see design as part of a much bigger process – and an important part of the business.

Good design still matters enormously. It can make a brand distinctive, memorable and engaging. But its real value comes when it’s rooted in a clear understanding of the organisation, its audience and what it’s trying to achieve.

That’s what consultancy means to me.

It’s not about replacing creativity with strategy. It’s about using experience, strategic thinking and design thinking together to make creativity more purposeful and meaningful.