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You don’t construct a building façade-first, then install services, framework and foundations. You don’t build a car by starting with the bodywork. We don’t (unless recovering from a big night out) dress coat & shoes first.  So why are some brands designed from the outside-in, imposing personality at odds with experience? Outside-in brand design can set expectations significantly adrift of reality, resulting in dissonant and negative communications and an unsustainable brand.  How do you build a sustainable brand? From the inside out.

Graphic design is superficial, ephemeral.  Much of it ends up, if not as yesterday’s fish & chip paper (they don’t do that any more), in the bottom of the budgie cage’s (no-one keeps those any more either), binned and recycled until fit only for landfill.  Pixels or paper, graphic design is largely transient, disposable. Its outcomes may be all about about the surface but there is every reason why its process should have more depth.

At Wolff Olins as far back as the 1970s a much-used maxim was “you can’t paper over the cracks” i.e. if your company/product/service is poor, a stunning visual identity will not help you long-term, it only creates a credibility gap that makes things worse. Advice that clearly never reached the ears of hapless BP CEO Tony Hayward…

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