Brand
studies
Personal exercises in brand voice, mark making, and the small visual decisions that make a system feel intentional.
Focus
Personal exercises in brand voice, mark making, and the small visual decisions that make a system feel intentional.
Medium
Print, identity
Last updated
December 2025
Fictional brand briefs that I use to practice voice, mark making, and system thinking outside of client constraints.
Nothing here is meant to live in the world. They exist to keep the discipline of building a coherent system, from a single mark out to a full applied system, sharp.
Voice before
mark.
I try to do voice work before any visual work. The mark, the type, and the colour are downstream decisions if voice is clear.
Most brand systems that feel inconsistent are not actually visually broken. They are voice problems that visual choices cannot patch.
System over
surface.
Surface is what most people notice. System is what makes a brand survive contact with a real team over years.
These studies are mostly about that quieter layer: how a system holds when applied at different sizes, languages, and contexts.
Plates.
Open
questions.
- How do you brief voice without copying someone else's adjectives?
- When does a system stop helping and start constraining?
- What makes a mark feel inevitable versus arbitrary?