Work in Process
The Swail Studio Blog about Branding,
visual identity, magic, and the void.
sit in the sun with me
I just moved 1000 miles across the country and I’d like to sit in the sun and dream for a minute, if you’ll join me.
It’s time.
How do you know it’s the right time to commit to a new brand? I’ve found lots of good indicators that *it’s time* to rebrand over the years, but here are some of the biggest green flags that it’s time to hire someone to lay down the basics of your visual identity and make your life a little easier.
Honestly, branding is superficial.
It’s thought of as a nice-to-have, but definitely not critical, investment. Maybe you'll get to it when you have a "really good" year or something.
But lately, I’ve been thinking about how the superficiality of branding isn’t a bug — it’s a feature.
Why I don’t base brands on birth charts or archetypes
I’m an Aries sun / Cap moon / Leo rising, a 2/4 Sacral Generator, and an Enneagram 5w4. I consider Swail Studio to be loosely Creator/Magician/Outlaw in Jungian archetypes, I based my own brand on The Tower card, and regularly consult Tarot when I’m feeling queasy about a business decision.
And I don’t base the brands I create on ANY of these archetypal systems. Here's why.
…but what if I don’t like it??
A lot of weight gets put on having and maintaining a perfectly-dialed-in brand, and part of the point of Intuitive Brand Kits is to take away some of that heaviness.
So, I want to address a few of the deep, dark fears that come up around investing in branding.
I would rather die.
I have watched a pathological amount of Star Trek this year.
I firmly believe that all media you binge-consume counts toward something positive eventually. There’s a reason you’re drawn to it. Especially while paralyzed on the couch during a depressive episode.
Then, there’s the media that immediately changes your life.
Sold-out launch debrief
Since we're all online business owners here, I think it’s only fair to share what I learned and observed over the course of this month. Here’s what moved the needle for me this summer, in no particular order.
Do you know yourself “well enough” to rebrand yet?
I want to answer an FAQ that often comes up when talking to prospective clients:
Do I know myself and my business well enough to get a brand kit? I’m in a transition, and I'm not completely sure who I am, or what is next, right now.
How I broke down my business to build it back up
Once I opened up how I was available to work, the kind of work I thought I wanted, and detangled my hard boundaries from systems that made things unnecessarily hard for my clients and myself... work is beginning to flow again.
Post-traumatic creative growth
For so long, I let my experience of creating the work, the pressure and fear that I felt in the trenches of it, completely cloud my perception of the result. Until this month, I couldn’t bear to look at so many of these projects, and it was IMPOSSIBLE for me to consider them as they are: truly some of my best work.