Studio Note #49: The Familiarity Problem.
When you spot your “brilliant” idea in the wild.
There’s a reason certain industries all start to look the same.
Financial companies have upward-pointing graphs. Colorado companies have mountains. Cybersecurity companies have shields. Environmental companies have leaves. Law firms have scales and columns. Construction companies apparently have an unlimited supply of hexagons.
None of these ideas are inherently bad. In fact, there’s a reason they show up so often. They make sense.
That’s also the problem.
One of the first things we do when starting an identity project is let the obvious ideas happen. If a company’s name, industry or story immediately creates a visual association, we write it down. Sketch it. Follow it for a minute. There’s no benefit in pretending we didn’t think of the obvious thing just because we’re designers and we're supposed to be more clever than that.
But the first idea usually isn’t the destination. It’s a reference point.
If we immediately associate an industry with a particular symbol, there’s a pretty good chance another designer did too. More importantly, there’s an even better chance the people who started the other 500 companies in that industry made the same connection.
You can see it when you start looking at competitors together instead of individually. One set of scales in a law firm identity looks perfectly reasonable. Put 30 law firm logos next to each other and suddenly you realize Lady Justice has been working a lot of overtime.
That’s where the identity process gets interesting.
The goal isn’t necessarily to run as far away from the obvious idea as possible. Familiarity has value. Visual shorthand works because people understand it quickly, and making a company look completely disconnected from the category it operates in just for the sake of being different can create a different problem.
The work is figuring out what to keep and what to leave behind.
Sometimes the obvious symbol can be pushed somewhere unexpected. Sometimes there’s a secondary idea hiding in the company’s story that is far more interesting. Sometimes the name gives us something the industry doesn’t. Sometimes the answer has nothing to do with a symbol at all and comes from typography, color, composition or the broader visual system.
That’s why we don’t think the first idea is something to avoid.
It tells us where everyone’s brain naturally goes.
And once we know where everyone starts, we can decide whether there’s actually a reason to stay there.