Dan

Results may vary, but it works best.

BUT if the clients say they want a cat for a logo, then you don't need to do this.

If they love logos that have a brain in it, I might do a brain, but they wouldn't care if I didn't. But if they hate the brain and I showed them a logo of a brain, they'd think I am an idiot.

Hates become like boundaries that we can't cross.

We've been one-shotting logos so far.

The trick here is not to focus on likes but rather on hates (there was an instant where decision makers really liked one logo, then we went that direction).

Once they select the direction, we send 20-30 logos that we source from Cosmos or Pinterest to see what they like or dislike. We ask all decision makers to fill it out.

So during the kick-off call, we ask decision makers what logo direction they wanna go (3 choices):

> abstract
> logo
> square

Designers have been intrigued by our branding process, especially the love/hate exploration for logos.

It took us a year to figure it out, but now we're not changing a thing bout it because it works well.

We're doing branding for a web series, something similar to Hot Ones.

We're now working mostly with YC-backed startups, but this sounded awesome and different, so we took it in.

That's my criteria now, if it sounds cool, I'm in.

That’s why we only work with teams who have funding now. If investors believe in them, we’d be stupid not to.

You can rebrand a product, but you can’t re-product a brand.
That’s an original quote. Someone frame it.

2. I’d rather get branding published than get paid.

We had a client who hired us pre-PMF, and the product failed. The branding never saw daylight. I’d rather not get paid than waste good branding.

Founders should keep design simple, get users, validate the idea, then invest in real branding.

Here are two reasons why (one is selfish):

1. Don’t waste good branding on a bad product.

Name changes, startups pivot, and logos become irrelevant. Why waste money?

Our client said branding didn’t matter much when they were joining Y Combinator, and I agree 100%.
They got accepted because of their product.

I think the same: branding should come post-PMF, not before.

Luke and I spent 10 hours nonstop designing the Coderabbit station takeover, and it's finally live!

Celebrating it with a pepperoni pizza tonight.

Clients loved it, signed off, and now we wait for them to launch their rebrand.

> What do you do?
> How do we contact you?

That’s why the website is straight to the point.

Here’s what we do: here are the certifications, get in touch.

We also had a sticky on-rails nav that locks on, which has “get in touch” always visible, and every single page has a big contact block.

Then Ana came in, made repeatable components, improved spacing and layout, made most of the pages way better (mine was boring), and that’s what we got.

Also, there were a few design decisions that we made because their ICP are older males working in prime defence.

They want to know:

One competitor had a clean homepage structure.

Another had a big fat logo in the footer.

Amalgamated inspirations from all and scaffolded the structure and layout.

This website was signed off, and handed over.

I’ll walk you through the process that me and Ana went through:

I started with research and direction-finding.

Did a deep dive into their competitors and took inspiration from what they did well (and did wrong).

I wake up thinking about the project, but they don't wake up thinking about me (one did, and it got weird).

Might as well just chill out.

Before, if a client didn't respond for 3 days, I would be blowing up Luke's DMs, saying they might drop off, they're leaving, etc (crying about it).

Now, I've learned to calm down.

I'll do my part, hand it over to them, and don't stress if they take a week to respond.

They wanted to refresh their branding because they felt that clients might have been turned off by it.

It just wasn't urgent for them the way it is for founders burning through their own cash or being up against the clock for a seed round.

The fastest branding sprint we did was 7 days.

The slowest was 2 months.

It was slow because we were working with the director of a decades-old company, and branding was such a background activity for them.

Even when I was hiring engineers, I purposely went out of my way not to care about their degrees. All I cared about was the output.

So by my calculations, to build a design studio, you need two ingredients:

> no design degree
> contempt for corporate design leader

Should be enough.

I was like, well… what if I start a design studio without a freaking degree?

And here we are.

Apart from the spite, I always liked drawing and design, so it was just another motivator to prove to these egoistic people that you don’t need a design degree to be a designer. It’s all about skill.

I told them, “Look, I’ll happily be like a part-time design intern so I can help my team succeed.”

And they said, “I would never have you as an intern without a design degree.”

After that, I hated them because of their ego and arrogance.

I started my design studio out of pure spite.

I was working as an engineering manager, and we had only one product designer. They were a real bottleneck.

We had to wait a lot and couldn’t move as fast, so I offered to do wireframes to speed up the process.

If I were constantly consuming branding content, our branding projects wouldn’t be cool, they’d look generic.

Now they’re unique, bold, and they stand out.
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Getting inspiration from the same source is like being stuck in an echo chamber.

I recently bought a hand‑illustrated comic book from a UK artist; it’s beautiful, and not something I’d ever see while casually scrolling social media. Then there are films, video games, architecture, nature and the outdoors, even product packaging.
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How we create unique branding for clients is by seeking inspiration from the outside world.

That’s how we design differently from everyone else.
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What’s even funnier is that it’s not his type of design, but he loved that it stood out so much that he couldn’t forget about it.

I guess we’re doing something right.

Just closed two clients for a brand sprint.

Kinda funny that the reason one of them booked a call was that the branding we did for Sparkles was stuck in his mind for like 2 days.