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When we talk about visual identity, we often reduce it to logos, color palettes, or Instagram grids. But a brand’s visual alignment is not a checklist. Visual identity is not only about who you are today. It is about who you want to walk alongside you in the future. The best brands leave room to grow without losing themselves.
An expert eye always thinks forward. If you build something too tight, too trendy, or too literal, it will age fast. If you build something rooted in feeling, culture, and intention, it can evolve naturally without needing to reinvent itself every six months.
Most people look for inspiration in the same industry they operate in. That’s safe, but it’s also how brands start to look interchangeable.
Your visual identity does not need to come from your category. It needs to come from your world. You can be inspired by a painting, an album cover, a poem, a film scene, a building, or a subculture. There is always a way to translate emotion into form.
If your brand wants to feel raw, maybe the answer lives closer to punk flyers than to polished SaaS decks. If your brand wants to feel poetic, you might learn more from literature than from logo trends. If your brand wants to feel timeless, architecture will teach you more than Instagram ever could.
Good brands don’t borrow aesthetics. They build a visual language.
An art director is not collecting pretty things. They are looking for patterns.
What repeats across your references?
Is it contrast or restraint?
Silence or noise?
Symmetry or disruption?
Precision or chaos?
Visual alignment is not about taste alone. It is about coherence. If your message is emotional, your visuals cannot be cold. If your brand is rebellious, your design should not ask for permission. And one important rule: if everything stands out, nothing does. Focus is a design decision.
Here is an exercise I often use before any design work begins. Choose three references that inspire you and have nothing to do with your industry:
Put them together and write down what they share emotionally and visually. Not what they are, but how they feel. That shared feeling is your starting point.
From there, make intentional choices:
You are not designing assets yet. You are setting direction.
A brand should not trap you in who you were when you started. It should be flexible enough to grow with your confidence, your clarity, and your ambition. Think about your future self. Would they still feel comfortable inside this visual identity?
Would it still represent them? If the answer is no, simplify. Remove what is decorative. Keep what is essential. Consistency is not rigidity. It is respect.
My visual language has never come from one place. It is deeply shaped by musicians like Damon Albarn and Julian Casablancas, by Polaroids, scrapbooks, and books by Bukowski, by the discipline and freedom of Coco Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent, by the visual poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire and his calligrams, by indie films that feel unfinished in the best way, and by the raw honesty of The Ramones and the punk movement in general. That’s my motto: be a punk rocker, do it yourself.
The blog culture, the creative world, the constant noise of opinions and trends is a mess. But it is my mess. And instead of fighting it, I learned to organize it into a point of view.
That is what I wish for you too.
Find your mess. Study it. Respect it. Shape it into something intentional. Because being a grown-up and running a business does not mean you lose yourself, what you love, or worse, your soul.
The bad news is that no one can do the work for you.
The good news is that no one else can be you.
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