A couple of weeks before his birthday, my uncle-in-law announced he was going solo as a mason, starting his own company. I couldn’t think of a better birthday present than offering to design his logo, but could I think of an idea strong enough to fend off all the usual clichés favored by self-employed craftsmen?
Nobody’s calling cathedral builders
It’s all a matter of perspective. Any given situation depends entirely on how you look at it, just as your own situation can change completely, depending on how people look at you. Calling yourself a ‘cathedral builder’ might be the right move if you find yourself in a world of corporate euphemisms and maxims, but, as a newly minted solo mason looking for new business, it might be a mistake. Yes, the reference to ‘the story of three bricklayers’ is dreadfully outdated but I do find it relevant here. Not because this here also is a story of a bricklayer, but because ‘the story of three bricklayers’ could easily had been a parable about branding.
When you set out to brand something, you want to make it as interesting as possible, enough to leave a memorable impression. But at the same time, you want that impression to stay within the realm of utility (assuming that you’re not branding a scam). This is something I always consider in any branding effort I get involved in, and this one was no different. At first, you always tend to overshoot by a wide margin. This is probably because you start by immersing yourself in the brand subject and usually end up drilling so deep for insights that the glaring solutions can no longer reach you. Combine that with the natural expectation of being thrilled yourself with the solution you come up with — after searching the bedrock of the subject matter — and you could have an explanation for why first attempts often are noticeable for all the wrong reasons; you run too deep with the metastories and the plot gets lost. But then again, you can’t just give the plot away if you expect people to pay attention.
The ideal target is somewhere the viewer gets pleasantly surprised and still feels at home; where the prospect already knows what you have to offer yet still wants to hear more; where the client buys your sales pitch with dreams of writing an ending of their own. At least in theory, that is. Because what so often happens, as you are honing in, is that the world kindly reminds you that it is far from ideal. Your aspirations of the perfect branding performance — the one that will solidify your guru status with a sales miracle — get crushed as they clash with guarded agendas, higher priorities and personal taste. But this time, with this client, given these circumstances, I was free to set the bar as high as I could raise it.
Fair and square one
History can really do a number on you in regard to branding. As it always has two sides to it, crafting a single brand expression that owners can see themselves in and that consumers would want to get behind is truly the art of compromise. In the life story of any consumer, client or customer (or any one of us for that matter), they themself is starring as the main protagonist. Brands get introduced as supporting cast from time to time, helping the protagonist (i.e. customer) solve a particular problem or reach a certain goal. Following that introduction though, the protagonist’s single expectation is that the support (i.e. brand) stays available and ready to repeat, should their services be needed again. That, of course, entails for the brand to evolve and to stay on top of the customers’s lifestyle in case it is called upon, but besides a nonintrusive seasonal greeting or the occasional indirect ready-when-you-are reminder, the customer just about prefer the brand to be waiting by the phone in this relationship.
As for the owner of the brand, however, that is not how the story goes. Different from the costumer’s perspective, the owner plays the lead in this version. And by extension, so does the brand that they have sacrificed years of their life to build and grow. They are essentially living a professional creation myth that more than likely is the tale they would like to see told on the media canvas. And therein lies the rub: a brand means something different to those who use it than to those who produced it. Who you need to favor as a marketeer depends, but it almost always comes down to a choice between market-facing or morale boosting, because trying to reconcile both perspectives into something everybody would fall for almost never lands well. Luckily, I didn’t have to worry about neither owner’s legend nor existing customer relationships, but there still remained a third group of hecklers that I couldn’t ignore: new customers in need.
More often than one would think, the most convincing selling points are those customers start visualizing of their own accord.
To get on the good side of this crowd, and to make sure that Murermester Felisto would seem irresistible to them, I figured I could take one of three branding approaches — almost as they were written in ‘the story of three bricklayers’. First option would be the basic ‘bricklayer approach’. This is the route roughly 90% of all self-employed craftsmen take as they’re driving by, flashing their name, a clipartesque logo, a bullet list of services offered and a fat phone number on the side of their work van. Second option would be the ‘builder approach’. This approach is for the craftsmen who don’t throw a catch-all net and are particular about the jobs they take on. It would typically promote a whole aspect of construction instead of just advertising individual crafting skills and it would probably feature a company name rather than a personal one, printed on more than one vehicle. The third option would be the aforementioned 'cathedral builder approach’. Here, we’re leaving the realm of bulletin-board marketing and stepping into the mythical. This approach is normally exclusive to large contractors with thick brand manuals and a whole fleet of vehicles.
After considering these options, I wasn’t completely sold on any one of them, though. With each being either too far off or too far away, I started to wonder what a hybrid solution would look like. Although I couldn’t claim ‘cathedral builder’, looking a bit majestic couldn’t hurt. And even though a one-mason show can’t meet the same customer needs that a multi-crew builder can, his branding can definitely still spark an interest in any observer.
Rather show you than sell you
More often than one would think, the most convincing selling points are those customers start visualizing of their own accord. Sometimes, especially when selling tailor-made services, it is more persuasive to be open to projections than to paint the full picture. Provide the accidental evidence needed for having them arrive at the desired conclusion. And if it can be delivered with an inaudible hum of suggestion, even better. Of course, when put like that, it may sound borderline nefarious to some. But if I were to pick “The Best-Ever Bricklayer” as a slogan, most prospects would for sure go: “Take a hike!”. My task, as a designer, is to make all introductions to a brand the best they can be. Preferably, an introduction should pave the way to a trusting relationship, forged over multiple successful interactions. To think of the introduction as an opportunity to get the trust without enduring the trials is a well-documented mistake (the lost-them-at-hello fallacy) and it is to be avoided at all costs.
Before deciding on anything though, more potential pitfalls needed consideration. There’s a number of reasons why the clipartesque logo and bullet list combo is a staple among “the bricklayers”, but a big one among them is that nobody calls an entrepreneur to fix up their private bathroom. Nothing makes you focus on the bare essentials like being billed by the hour — especially when paying out of your own pocket, so naturally, I couldn’t afford to alienate the private clientele. As it just so happened, Felisto specializes in tiling, which meant that I could collapse the whole mandatory service list into a single word slogan (in Danish): “Flisespecialist”. That single stroke alone cleaned up his whole visual profile, albeit at the cost of putting a whole extra layer of demands on the logo design.
If you approach the act of achieving a great design as a trick that needs to be pulled, you have already been fooled.
When you lose the subtitles, you rely on the image to say it all: what it is that you’re looking at, why you should care and how you should feel. If I could just design a logo that: introduced itself in a naturally confident manner, drew you closer with every detail it revealed and turned you from critiquing to believing while having you walking away with a good feeling… that would just be great. As you can properly tell, I had my work cut out for me. Unfortunately, color commentary is an absolute certainty while the great performance is not. If you approach the act of achieving a great design as a trick that needs to be pulled, you have already been fooled. Every time I’ve felt confident that the great aesthetic secrets of the universe had been bestowed upon me, my next project tended to flip the script on me, leaving me searching for guiding principles in the dark. There’s a fine line between instruction and obstruction, and guidelines can quickly seduce you with the lure of settling for small wins — “follow these steps to forget about your goal”. In the end, I went with the only advice I could vouch for: imagine your desired destination, know what you’re up against, recognize dead ends before they drain you, always watch where you’re going, take a step back daily to see the big picture, try looking from the outside in, top down, bottom up, and above all else, believe you can make it there.
Leave no stone untiled
Murermester Felisto has been driving from customer to customer, flashing his new logo on the side of his work van, for a while now. And as for the question of whether or not I made it stand out and up to all the clichés, I’ll let you to decide. But judging from the feedback from his fellow craftsmen and associates, it has made quite an impression. Felisto himself is also very pleased with it, and along with his work van, it has now been featured on his workwear, tool labels, business cards, SoMe ads and more.
What I like most about it is how it all comes together: the sturdy quality you expect from a builder, the cornerstone perspective, the transformation from bare stones to clean facade, how the facade makes up the ‘F’, the precise reverse mirroring of the two shapes that combine to a balanced symbol, and the fact that it holds up great in small print, all without giving off lego-like vibes or suffering from vector artish complexity. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t proud of this one.