Is Branding just a term?
A worldview?
A one-way conversation?
A creative excuse for violence?
This provocation is part of an ongoing conversation between Martin Lorenz and Emily Harris, centred on the role of design (and specifically Designers) in the context of an extractive economic system. A system that we are all complicit in yet which is systematically incompatible with life. These topics are not easy. In fact they are deeply uncomfortable. Why then do we, or might you, wish to engage with them? Perhaps because continuing to bury these inconvenient thoughts with busyness and self-justification is starting to feel slippery and insubstantial. A sickness we can’t quite identify but yearn to recover from.
Just because something is trending, it isn’t better
If you are a designer in your 20’s or 30’s you probably grew up with the term Branding. Growing up with something makes it hard to question it. It seems to be the normality you have to accept and adjust to. But the term Branding, as inoffensive as it seems, deserves a hard second look.
I (Martin Lorenz) am not in my 20’s or 30’s, I am in my late 40’s. When I studied design, Branding was called Corporate Design or Visual Identity Design or Corporate Visual Identity Design. Then came digital design (and the internet) and with a little delay, a wave of new terms popped up to respond to this new reality. Design studios known for being innovative invented a myriad of new terms to describe the new kind of Visual Identity Design: Liquid Identities, Fluid Identities, Evolving Identities, Generative Identities, Living Identities and Dynamic Identities.
When the new comes with force, and you are young, it is exciting. You feel born into a movement that will change the world. There are comprehensible arguments why the old must go and the new has to be fought for. I am no exception. Focusing on a more flexible and systemic approach to design corresponded to a feeling of that time. I knew very little about the new design terms, but as they came from my design heroes and sounded intriguing I did not question them. Authority and the promise of the new was sufficient to make me a devoted follower, until it was not.
I went back to University and started researching the flexible, systemic approach to design. Surprise, systems were always a part of design. Yes, it became more flexible through digital design, the internet and the devices we use, but what has been hyped as a completely new kind of design, has been, in its essence, around for centuries.
Selling something old by making it apparently new, is an old marketing trick. Invent a new term, and you are the only expert in this new market. Make it plausible, and you will find young followers to help you in your fight for your unique selling position (USP). Using an old term, that makes more sense, but makes you look outdated is bad for business.
While this reasoning is completely plausible in the economic environment that design currently serves, it does not mean it is a healthy way to think, act and relate to others. It shifts design’s focus away from a profession in service of society and towards an economic tool that firmly places profits before people, ego before ecosystem. As designers we have a choice: do we want design to be a culture or an industry?
Why Branding is not just a term
You could argue that we are just talking about words and words are just words. They do no harm. In contrast, our work at Dark Matter Labs frequently highlights that words both constitute and express worldviews and that worldviews define how we see (or not see) and act (or not act). Words are not neutral; they can and often DO harm.
The Branding worldview comes from a gruesome etymology. The term has its origins in the branding of livestock or slaves. A logo was branded on the skin of animals² and humans³ to claim their ownership. The intrinsic value of these living beings was reduced to the singular value that could be extracted for private gain.
I (Emily Harris) would argue that the ability to collapse diverse values into singular measures of utility is the beating heart of our extractive economy. If we take a moment to think about this, it was an extraordinary shift in human philosophy and behaviour. Something only made possible by an emotional dissociation from all forms of life (including other humans). This separation, sometimes described as Othering⁴ is paradoxically the foundational rock of our modern economy.
‘Enclosure and colonisation were necessary preconditions for the rise of European capitalism…..Something else was needed — something far subtler but nonetheless equally violent. Early capitalists not only had to find ways to compel people to work for them, they also had to change people’s beliefs. They had to change how people regarded the living world. Ultimately, capitalism required a new story about nature’. — Jason Hickel⁵
Hickel, J. (2020). P.20. Less is more: how degrowth will save the world. UK: Penguin Random House.
Capitalism still needs that story for its own survival — my question to designers is whether this is a story that they are proud to uplift?
In accounting for economic activity we actively exclude aspects of the living world from our measures of success. There is even a term for it: externalities⁶, which basically means ‘something out there that we don’t need to deal with’. Following this logic, we do not have to deal with the value of life beyond its immediate (financial) value to us. An animal is food or clothing. A tree is lumbar. A human is useful labour. Nature is fodder for the foaming crucible of shareholder returns. Even culture and tradition delicately woven over centuries ends up being extracted. Property owners benefit from the culture of a neighbourhood, even though they did not contribute in any way.
Branding has consequences
Branding is superficial, but has deep consequences. Designers tend to focus on this thin layer between company and consumer, declaring it our entire world. A beautiful little world which revolves around aesthetics and craft. We (including I — Martin Lorenz) do not want to see the first or second order effects of our doing and the doing of the ones we support with our talent. Maybe it is time to measure the success of our work differently? Maybe we should focus on outcome and not output? Maybe the judges shouldn’t be our fellow designers, but all stakeholders involved in the before and after? Perhaps we should proactively ask those who currently have no voice?
Branding has colonized all aspects of life. We are supposed to love brands and define ourselves through them. It has become easier for us to remember and distinguish brands than animals or plants. We live in a colonized world of consumption. In the book Post-Branding Jason Grant and Oliver Vodeb draw a link between today’s Branding and the Branding of Nazi Germany: ‘This Nazi history is particularly interesting because although these are antecedents, and what we now call branding is very much a contemporary neoliberal phenomenon, the parallels are striking. For example, counter to what we might think, Nazis actually wanted to abolish the state — for them it was just a means to an end. Does this sound familiar in today’s neoliberal context?’⁷⁸ Comparing today’s brands to the abhorrence of the Nazi regime might seem extreme, but given the fracturing geopolitical context can we afford to squirm away from this kind of friction? We would firmly argue that the answer is no.
https://www.printmag.com/daily-heller/the-daily-heller-is-post-branding-a-thing/
When designing the visual identity of the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, the first Olympic Games in Germany after the Nazi Regime, Otl Aicher addressed the problem of flags. He suggested that national flags should no longer dominate the sports venues and the opening ceremony. Instead, neutral flag groups in the Olympic colors would denationalize the games. However, the participating countries protested against this suggestion, not wanting to miss the opportunity to present their own national colors. Therefore, the flags of the individual nations continued to be displayed along the Olympic Stadium. In the Munich city area, however, Aicher’s colorful flag groups prevailed.
Unlearning Branding
Where and how can we question what design does for whom and how?⁹ If design schools are becoming companies, students become customers and design degrees get branded like products, we will remain ‘prisoners’ in an unlocked global cell, passively compliant in a violent economic system. If we stay in our little design world, discussing output instead of outcome, how can we participate in this huge conversation called culture?¹⁰ If we want to change how design is used, which ultimately also changes how design is made, we need to ask the big questions together with all stakeholders of life:
- What does living well mean?
- How do we design into this future?
- How do we do this together?
The answers will most likely play out as an infinite conversation. A dance born out of reciprocity, alive with curiosity and bound by aesthetic wisdom. In 2025 we invite you to join us as we continue to explore the culture and praxis of design.
“We did some research where we looked at the shift in how design studios have promoted themselves and self-identified. In Australia, for example, there were virtually no graphic design practices that called themselves “branding agencies” or offered “branding” as their key service prior to the year 2000. Only two decades later, in 2022, around 85% were doing it. Also consider branding guru Wally Olins’ bibliography. All his books prior to 2000 have “identity” or “corporate identity” in the title, but from 2003 (with On Brand) they all feature “Brand” instead. Universities design programs used to teach “visual identity design”; now they teach “branding.” This isn’t just the adoption of new terminology, it’s the emergence of a new industry.”https://www.printmag.com/daily-heller/the-daily-heller-is-post-branding-a-thing/
“You know, I think that the problem, as I said earlier, about the GNP argument is that, okay it’s nice to know that we’ve all contributed £28 billion, I think it was last year, to the Gross National Product. But it isn’t the most important thing. The most important thing is that we have been altogether — that doesn’t mean just ‘the artists’, so called, it means everyone, it means all the people actually in the community, everybody — has been generating this huge, fantastic conversation which we call culture. And which somehow keeps us coherent, keeps us together. If you will accept that that might be correct, then you might also think well, it sounds pretty important, that job.” Brian Eno https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p033smwp
Endnote about Conversational Design
An essential aspect of Conversational Design, as we understand it, is transparency. Design lives on an intangible layer and can be persuasive, which undermines the freedom of the reader. By disclosing our intention we want to enable the reader to question our decisions. In this text there were two main points we want to highlight:
1. Initially this text was written by one person. But is a text really ever written by one person? Isn’t everything we think and write based on the thoughts of others? Giving a voice to the hidden voices, by adding sources and footnotes, letting them speak, avoids a linear narrative, pretending to be the only truth. Multiple voices allow for a more nuanced and even better, contradictory conversation. We need opposition to spark the conversation in us. As the great atomic physicist Niels Bohr said — ‘it is the hallmark of any deep truth that its negation is also a deep truth’.¹¹
2. We were discussing if we should show the original image material or design custom illustrations for this text. In our opinion the text deserves the love of a custom illustration, but it might also contradict our intentions. We reject the idea of branding because it creates a surface that does not let us see beneath the persuasion. On the other hand we also see writing and drawing as part of culture. Not communicating with visual language would reduce the bandwidth of our conversations. Where would you draw the line?
Niels Bohr was a Danish physicist and Nobel Prize winner. Known for being the first scientist to apply the quantum concept he is widely regarded as one of the most notable physicists of the 20th century. As quoted in The Matter With Things by Iain McGilchrist, Chapter 20, p.813.