Our New Brand Identity reflects our heart — literally | Part I
The story behind Clearcut’s new brand identity and overcoming psychological barriers.
The last couple of years have been an interesting journey in finding our purpose. We kept changing our course of action, and priorities drastically until reaching to a point where I had to question myself the deeper reason of why I am doing the things that I do 😅.
I’ll probably try to talk about my “Self-discovery” in another article, this story’s about our journey trying to give a new identity to Clearcut.
😏 First of all, Why the rebrand?
To provide some context, we have put enormous amounts of effort doubling down on our skills in design, development & marketing, in the past year.
As a result, We are now capable of offering the three crucial components required in serving any modern day business — design, tech, and marketing. We felt that we needed to tell this story and the current brand doesn’t reflect our capabilities. Therefore, we needed an updated Brand Identity to reflect all of the things we’ve become.
🤔 So what’s the catch?
Ever since the beginning of the design process of the new brand identity, none of the ideas seemed good enough. I kept putting off many iterations in order to find that one right design.
Over the last few years, this was the case with almost everything that I’ve done — work and life. The constant obsession to perfect things and a mild case of Imposter Syndrome had a crippling effect on my ability to get most things done.
Then, a deeper question hit me:
Why am I sitting here thinking that no idea is good enough for something as rudimentary, from a macro perspective, as a brand identity?
😎 So.. How did I overcome the catch?
To get to bottom of the issue on why I was too crippled to make progress, I turned towards a technique often used in making business/product decisions.
Some of you might already know this — Whenever in question about an issue, asking the right “Why?” questions, the right amount of times, will ultimately lead you to the root cause of the problem.
Some people know it as the ‘5 Why’ principle. But I’d not be so concerned about asking “Why” exactly 5 times as the mainstream name implies. In my experience, it can sometimes be less than 5, sometimes more.
Anyways, I began asking myself these “Why” questions.
- Why am I unable to make progress fast enough?
Ans: I wanted this new Identity to be perfect, and I don’t think I’m convinced with any directions that I’ve had so far. - I’ve had close to a dozen ideas, why don’t I like any of them?
Ans: I feel like I have a much higher standard to reach when I’m sharing the industry with some of the best-talented design teams and designers that we know, and as a result, my levels of comparison are super high. - It’s good that I have adulation for other teams, but Why do I think that I haven’t reached that standard with any of the ideas I’ve had so far?
Ans: There it was! I haven’t clearly defined what that standard is.
I’ve found the root cause of my problem!!
😍 And what are those standards to reach?
👉 It should reflect our ability in logo & brand design.
👉 It should convey our personality.
👉 It needs to be modern and should adapt to different environments like web, social media, print, and stationery.
Once I’ve successfully been able to identify the root cause and listed out the qualities of a brand identity that would satisfy my obsessive brain, things moved on much faster.
In Part 2, I get into some nerdy details about designing the actual logo/identity. If you are a designer, you might like it. But if you are a non-designer reading this, you may like or may not like it. Either way, if you are curious of what came out the other end, do check out Part 2 here.
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