Respecting the Craft: Branding is hard

I've always had a lot of respect for branding. Working in product teams, you see what good brand work does. It gives the whole product a centre of gravity. Design decisions become easier because there's something to refer back to. Everyone's pulling in the same direction without needing to re-litigate the aesthetic from scratch every time.

What I hadn't appreciated was how much of that process depends on doing it with other people.

I'll just do my own branding

When I started a side project, I figured I'd handle the branding myself. I'd been close to enough brand work in teams to know what the output should look like. How hard could the process be.

Quite hard, it turns out.

In a team you have people to bounce things off. Someone pushes back on the typeface choice. Someone else spots that the colour palette doesn't hold up at small sizes. The iteration is built into the structure. Solo, none of that exists. You're making every decision in a vacuum, with no external signal about whether you're heading somewhere good or spending three hours going in circles.

The bit nobody tells you

The moodboard phase feels productive. You pull together references, colours, typefaces. There's momentum. Then you try to turn it into something coherent and the wheels come off. Elements that looked great in isolation clash in practice. The tone you had in your head doesn't translate into visual decisions the way you expected.

In a team, that's the moment someone with the right experience steers you back. Solo, you just sit with it.

I got there eventually. It took longer than it should have and the result is rougher than what a proper brand process would produce. But working through it gave me a much clearer picture of what brand creators are actually doing when they make it look easy.

What I came away with

The collaboration isn't incidental to the process. It is the process. The back and forth, the challenges, the shared reference points built up over time — that's where the coherence comes from. Strip that out and you're not doing a simpler version of the same thing. You're doing something fundamentally harder.

So if you're lucky enough to be working with a brand creator, get out of their way and let them work. They're not just making things look nice. They're managing a process that's much easier to appreciate when you've tried to run it on your own.