Discovering the brand

acrStudio

There are many ways to discover the essence of an organization’s culture and brand. One way is to collaborate with members of an organization through work sessions, many interviews and exploring the history of the organization’s visual collateral.

During a discovery session with an architecture firm, the team of designers that I was working with did several exercises with the leadership within the firm. One such exercise was to break the interviews into small groups and ask them to choose images of chairs and talk about which one(s) most reflect the firm as well as which ones are not aesthetically, structurally or visually relevant to how they see the firm.

Through this visual discussion we gained many insights into the aesthetics and dynamics of the firm, including a peak into the politics of design within the firm and a more casual and unguarded view of the philosophy of the firm’s architects and engineers.

The important thing was to engage the client(s) in a verbal free form discussion to gain insights into the visual Sensibilities. This information helped to inform the visual direction of design explorations taken as the project progressed.

Below are some of the chair images we used during this exercise.