Brand Tuned - Rounded Business Design

In this episode, Sean Adams, an internationally recognized graphic designer, and the chair of undergraduate and graduate graphic design at Art Center College of Design in California tells us to succeed with identities without really trying.
Sean Adams is the author of multiple best selling books, including The Designer’s Dictionary of Color.
Brand Identity is not a one-size-fits-all solution. It's a toolkit, an approach to solving problems, an equation. It's not a thing that you can just slap onto your business and hope for the best. You have to understand it and use it correctly in order to succeed with brand identities without really trying.
If you're just starting out, the process can seem overwhelming at first. Where do you even begin? What kind of logo is best for your business? How do you go about creating an identity that speaks to your customers and attracts new clients?
There’s no one right answer, but there are three kinds of identities that you need to understand to start with: word mark, monogram, and symbol. Your branding strategy may use one of these approaches, so it’s good to explore them all and know what they mean.
One of the trickiest aspects of branding is building equity over time. If you think about the Apple identity, it has that little bite out of it, which forces you to think a little bit, the more you think, the more it sticks in your head.
Design is an important part of branding. You can't just have a nice logo and expect people to buy your product. You have to make it appealing in other ways too, Branding isn't just about beauty and aesthetic, but it should be how we can make it unique.
We focus on certain colors because they've become emotionally loaded with meaning for us. How do we get those emotional meanings etched into our brand image?
This episode discusses:

• Three kinds of identities
• Building equity with symbols
• Choosing your branding fonts
• Visual attributes
• How to know you have a great designer/ designers sensibilities
• The cultural impact of color choices
• Semiotics
• Current challenges facing designers

www.seanadams.designResources mentioned on the podcast
The Designer’s Dictionary of Color
How Design Makes Us Think
Debbie Millman books
Sean Adams' LinkedIn leaning course on branding

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Alex Hamilton, CEO and founder of radiant law. He took his knowledge as a lawyer specializing in outsourcing technology and commercial contracts to create a groundbreaking innovative new law type business that he built up from the ground up. He speaks about his journey of founding a law company and how the business developed and sustainable.

• There were five of us who started the business, and most of us had been partners previously, so we had lots of contacts
• About three years in we had a rebranding exercise and came up with a current logo and look and feel which we've pretty much stuck with ever since
• I massively underestimated how hard it would be to put a new kind of business model in place in the law, to build up the business
• We have refined the values over the year, but it's more a question of simplifying them rather than changing them
• Start with the customer's needs, and that is absolutely fundamental to our thinking and we do keep coming back to that
• We distribute responsibility across the firm and you can have quite a lot of responsibility as a junior lawyer
• We do like kind of global market data contracts or content licensing agreements or service agreements and so on
• It is very different, I think from a traditional law firm which emphasizes, I would say autonomy of partners, in terms of they can operate anyway they like, obviously, they, in turn, require the junior lawyers working for them to work in very particular ways
• What we found most successful is feeding data back to the individual team members so they can always see how they're doing
• a lot of companies were sceptical about buying remote legal services, and have accepted it now in view of the lockdown

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Is being unique your ultimate goal in your business? How, exactly, do you stand out from your competitors and make sure that you remain a purple cow?
A crucial part of a business’ success is being distinctive and visibly different from its competitors. This is the main objective in creating business brand. Having a recognizable and distinctive name helps ensure you will be able to stand out from the crowd.
Distinctiveness is about the identifiers we use. These identifiers are how consumers recognise brands. They associate them with you. It’s your name, and brand elements you choose, such as your logo, any distinctive symbols, characters, shapes, sounds, colours etc.

When you’re creating your business' brand, understanding what competitors can and can't legitimately copy is key to creating a unique brand. Your focus should be as much on what to create as whether you can prevent copying of the elements you create..

That’s why creating slogans and taglines that are ownable is key to protecting our messaging strategy. We stand a greater chance of being associated with the message behind our strategy.
In today's fast-paced world, it is not enough to raise awareness of how we differ. We need to know and understand about intellectual property rights, and how this can help us achieve design choices that set us apart from competitors.

In this episode I touch on the laws governing the ownership of ideas and trademarks, as well as how to use them to protect your brand. I discuss:

• Two components for a business to stand out
• Difference between personal and business brands
• Intellectual Property
• Concept of distinctiveness
• Popeye the sailor
• How important trademark rights are in protecting business brands
• Famous personalities and their distinctiveness/uniqueness

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IP is much less formal in Latin America's economy according to Alberto Ramirez Bonilla, founder of BR Latin America. Tune in to explore how trademark practices differ in the South American economic landscape and why that matters.

Among other things the episode discusses:

• How business design and naming unfold across Latin America
• Branding and intellectual property in Latin America
• Copyright protection for software and guidelines for naming conventions
• Branding and naming strategies for businesses
• Importance of understanding IP law for businesses

LinkedIn: Alvaro Ramirez Bonilla

Website: BR Latin America

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