Over the last couple of weeks I’ve shared with you some of the brands that I love, and the reasons why. We’ve also looked at some of the learnings you can take into your own business and I hope that I’ve started to inspire you about how you can make your brand more engaging, more fun and perhaps more sticky.
But how do you make those lessons your own? Aside from the legalities of copying someone you admire, it just doesn’t make good business sense. Branding is all about differentiating yourself from your competitors, making yourself irresistible to your ideal clients and communicating in a way that makes people ache to work with you.
There’s a concept in design that no idea is ever new, that we’re constantly taking inspiration from what has gone before and building on it to create something fresh and new.
I think there’s a lot of truth in that.
Great design doesn’t just happen. Inspiration is all around us, and being good at what we do is about opening our eyes to what’s out there and creating a mental scrapbook of ideas, ready to call upon when the time is right.
The skill, for me, is in being able to make the appropriate links to inspiration and creating something that is inspired by, rather than slavishly copying, one or a multiple of trends. I often see ideas that are ‘inspired by’ something that just doesn’t fit with the company’s brand. And you know what? It doesn’t work, it feels awkward. Wrong somehow.
If you’re opening your eyes up to your branding then you need to take your inspiration from much of what’s around you. But then you need to put your own twist on it. If you don’t, it won’t be authentic. I was watching a video for Creative Live which Jasmine Star was presenting and she said something really powerful:
(I’m paraphrasing here)
“I’ve shown you how I did me. Now you need to work out how to do you.”
You can see the full video here.
And that for me is the essence of a great brand. Don’t put illustrations on your website because you like ours and you want a piece of it. Don’t wear (as Jasmine puts it) flare white jeans because she does. Don’t use that font because you’ve seen someone else using it and it seems to be working for them. Put your own spin on it, work out how you’re going to do you.
And so as you look through websites and cuttings of the brands that inspire you, look at what they do, what appeals to you and ask yourself why it works. But most importantly, ask yourself what your take is going to be.
You have to put your spin on things, and be able to walk away from an idea that you love because it doesn’t work for your brand.
So embrace the inspiration, keep your mind open to ideas, but know when to say no as much as yes.
