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Brand awareness is not your problem
Every week I talk to a founder who tells me "We need more brand awareness." And every week I ask the same question: "What happens when someone actually lands on your site?"
Silence. Or worse is they already know the answer. The site looks like it was built by a different company than the one they describe on sales calls.
If you're Series A to C your problem is what happens after they find you. The credibility gap, where your product has outgrown your brand, and every surface a prospect touches (like your site, your deck, your onboarding) quietly undermines the trust your sales team just spent 45 minutes building.
Pouring money into awareness when these surfaces don't convert attention into trust is like turning up the volume on a broken speaker.
Fix the gap first
Real great Example of viewing the problem from a structural angle... Love the last analogy "Turning up the volume of a broken speaker"...
Thank you
The network for creativity
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Connect with clients, get discovered, and run your business 100% commission-free
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I was on a client call today explaining why I went with a certain brand direction and halfway through I realized I wasn't explaining anything. I was figuring it out on the call.
Like.. the strategy doc exists and the rationale is in there. but the thing that came out was even better than what I had, and I think that's because I had to make it understandable for someone who's not in my head for 3 weeks.
Not sure if that's a bad thing or not? I think the reason presenting design work feels awful sometimes (at least for me) is because my thinking isn't done yet and I can feel myself finishing it in real time and there's nowhere to hide.
I've been trying to just... accept it? Like, stop treating the presentation as the thing after the work. It might be the work.
Still figuring that out tbh
It's for sure really hard to present design decisions when we feel as if nothing is ever considered "done". I think designers index pretty high on the perfectionism scale which makes it so difficult to feel like anything is ever complete. I think putting ourselves in positions...
what if a fashion brand's entire identity was built on a single rule?
one line. never lifted. every angle 90 degrees. no curves, no permission, no explanation.
that's STROKE, a contraculture brand I designed from scratch. logo, palette, type, apparel, collateral, web.
full case study below 👇
This is insanely clean. Limiting yourself to one rule and still creating something this expressive is next level. The discipline really shows.
A few months ago, the CEO of Unlikely AI reached out with a clear problem:
They needed custom design assets for their website that were simple, non-AI-generated, visually clean, and aligned with their brand while still feeling innovative.
Here’s how I approached bringing that vision to life:
I started with foundational research to deeply understand Unlikely AI as a brand. What stood out was their mission building reasoning-based AI systems that go beyond traditional machine learning, designed to think more like humans through logic, adaptability, and deeper understanding.
With that in mind, I moved to sketching 2D abstract forms that were:
Less complex
Easily recognizable
Editable
Flexible for web use
Every design decision was intentional balancing simplicity, innovation, and brand integrity.
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