What actually happens in a brand workshop
Process
By Ali
Every identity project starts with a workshop. Clients sometimes expect sticky notes and buzzwords. What they get is closer to a long conversation over a table covered in paper, photographs and objects.
Hour one: listening
We ask about the business, not the brand: who buys, why they come back, what they complain about, what the founder would never compromise on. The best brand ideas usually appear in the answers to ordinary questions.
Materials on the table during a workshop.Hour two: choosing
We bring around a hundred references — logos, papers, photographs, colours — and ask the team to sort them into yes, no and maybe. Nobody needs to explain why. The patterns that emerge tell us more than any mood word.
Hour three: agreeing
Together we write three sentences: who the brand is for, how it should feel and what it must never become. Those three sentences become the brief, and every design decision afterwards is tested against them.
The sorted references, pinned up after the session.Clients leave with a written brief within a week, whether or not they continue with us. It is the most useful three hours of the whole project.