You can research forever. You can make diagrams, interview people, study competitors and fill a wall with sticky notes. Eventually you have to put something in front of people and see what happens.

It’s easy to associate creative effort with output. More concepts, more options, more elements, more things to point at and say, we made this. But a huge part of the job is deciding what doesn’t deserve to survive. Sometimes progress is adding something. Just as often, it’s realizing you can take something away and nothing important is lost.

Sometimes you don’t need the whole business.
You just need enough to knock on the first door.

That doesn’t mean the brand was intentionally vague. There’s a big difference between leaving room and refusing to define yourself. Each part of the business still needs clear positioning. Capital needs to immediately make sense as Capital. The Network needs to make sense as the Network. VNDR Studios needs to make sense to someone looking for a branding partner.

Your positioning should be specific.
Your brand doesn’t have to be a prison.

Somewhere along the way, somebody decided the company needed a blog.
Maybe it was part of a new website.
Maybe someone read that blogging was good for SEO.
Maybe there was a meeting where the phrase “thought leadership” got thrown around a few too many times.

So they started one.

For about three weeks.

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.

A generic name might perfectly describe what your company does while making it nearly impossible to distinguish yourself from everyone else doing it. A clever name might sound great in a presentation but require an explanation every single time someone hears it. A name might be completely available legally and still be buried underneath twenty unrelated businesses when someone types it into Google.

We’ve built things. Scrapped things. Changed direction. Questioned the model. Rebuilt the model. Built a product and eventually realized the company needed to be bigger than the product.

But through every iteration, the goal has been the same: build something that genuinely makes doing business easier for the people we serve.

A homepage doesn't need to explain everything about a business.
It needs to create enough clarity and interest for someone to keep going.

A real hero didn't need to yell. He could be compassionate. Understanding. Calm.
He should be strong enough to be gentle.

There are artists whose work you recognize because you know the work. Then there are artists who create such a distinct visual language that eventually you recognize it whether you know anything about art or not.

Curry never seemed embarrassed by what he was doing. There was never that little wink to the audience that said, I know this is ridiculous too. If the character called for theatrical, he went theatrical. If it called for sinister, he was terrifying. If it called for completely unhinged, there was apparently no ceiling.

Maybe the answer to the content problem isn’t figuring out how to make more content.

Maybe it’s doing more things worth talking about.

Sometimes the best thing the first product can do is get you close enough to the problem that you finally understand the business you're actually building.

When the identity, website, messaging and materials feel considered and professional, they reinforce the idea that the organization itself is considered and professional. They remove a layer of doubt that otherwise has to be overcome before someone ever gets to the mission.

You can make things prettier. You can clean things up and make the pieces fit together. But that's not the same thing as building the right thing from the beginning.

If you want someone's expertise, bring them in before you make the decisions their expertise is supposed to inform.

The entire value of a sticker comes from someone deciding that whatever is printed on that little piece of vinyl deserves a spot on something they own.

When you look at your brand, your brain fills in the gaps.

Everyone else only sees what's actually there.

But Meltz does something more interesting than simply reproducing something that already existed.

It combines two things you remember, packages them inside a collecting experience that makes opening the thing part of the fun and creates something that never existed at all.