From Kickoff To First Concept: How To Turn Brand Strategy Into Visual Direction — Smashing Magazine

The Pre-Concept Phase: Finding The Visual Problem Before The First Sketch

Most branding projects don’t fail because of poor execution. They fail earlier, when words like “modern,” “trustworthy,” or “premium” are treated as shared understanding without ever being tested. Each stakeholder may nod along to the same adjective while holding a completely different picture in mind — one person hearing “premium” as refined and editorial, another as exclusive and expensive, a third as clean and minimal. Those three interpretations lead to three entirely different visual systems, and the gap between language and meaning only surfaces when the first concepts get reviewed.

That gap is what I call the “pre-concept” phase: the work between kickoff and the first visual direction. At this stage, the goal is not to collect more facts about the business but to clarify perception — what the team needs people to believe about the brand, where it must feel credible, and which category conventions it should follow or challenge. Once those questions get answered, turning strategy into something visual becomes a defined problem rather than a guessing game.

Decoding Brand Language Through Context

In one health tech engagement, the client said they wanted to feel “modern, trustworthy, and disruptive.” On its face, “disruptive” suggested something bold and unconventional. But their buyers were large government medical institutions, so the brand still had to feel credible inside a conservative healthcare environment. A rebellious or visually loud identity would have undercut the trust they needed. Their version of disruption — expressed through clarity, efficiency, and confidence — looked far more traditional than the word implied.

A fintech team likewise wanted to feel “bold” without losing credibility. Bold could have meant bright colors, oversized type, and an expressive system. But in a financial category, boldness had to carry signals of security, control, and competence. The question wasn’t whether to be bold; it was what kind of boldness would still read as trustworthy to their audience.

These cases show why broad adjectives fail as design guidance. The language needs specificity before it can direct any visual decision: What kind of modern? Trustworthy in what way? Disruptive compared to whom, and how far can the brand move from category expectations before the audience stops believing it?

Perception sits at the center of this discovery work because the brand ultimately lives in someone else’s mind.

“A brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or company.”

— Marty Neumeier, The Brand Gap

If that’s true, the workshop has to clarify what gut feeling the team is trying to create. The questions that matter most at this stage are the ones that reveal assumptions rather than collect opinions:

• What should people believe about the company after seeing the brand for the first time?
• What would make the brand feel credible in this category?
• If the brand were a person in the room, how would they speak?
• What do customers currently misunderstand about the company, product, or category?
• Where does the brand need to fit the category, and where does it need to break from it?

A broader set of discovery prompts is available in the Brand Workshop Toolkit: Questions and Exercises, a FigJam framework for structuring discovery conversations.

Making Stakeholders Think In Images

Words alone rarely move a team from strategy into visual territory. To make the abstract idea of a brand concrete, stakeholders need exercises that force them to think through images, associations, and relative perception. As Jake Knapp writes about GV’s Three-Hour Brand Sprint:

“The point of these exercises is to make the abstract idea of “our brand” into something concrete.”

— Jake Knapp

This is also where stakeholder participation becomes critical. Clients who only receive a strategy deck can stay passive, agreeing in the meeting while quietly holding onto unexamined assumptions. When they have to place a competitor on a map or explain why a reference feels credible, their beliefs and disagreements surface before they can derail the first concept review.

Two exercises help translate stakeholder language into material that can later inform look and feel, design principles, and concept development. The first looks outward at the category; the second turns inward at the brand itself.

Reading The Category Through Competitive Mapping

Before the workshop, collect screenshots of competitor brands, websites, product interfaces, and social visuals. During the session, ask the client team to place those competitors on a simple two-axis map. Choose axes based on the tension the brand needs to resolve. Common pairs include:

• Traditional to progressive
• Corporate to human
• Understated to bold
• Accessible to exclusive

For the health tech company wanting innovation without alienating conservative medical buyers, the map might use traditional to progressive and corporate to human. For the fintech brand seeking differentiation without losing trust, the axes might be understated to bold and accessible to exclusive.

The exercise isn’t about judging which competitors have “good” or “bad” design. It reveals how the client reads the category — what feels credible, generic, too conservative, or too experimental — and where open visual territory might exist. The most valuable output is often the disagreement the mapping creates. When one person reads a competitor as progressive and another as generic, or one sees premium while another sees cold, those clashes show exactly which definitions of trust, innovation, and credibility need to be resolved before design begins.

Defining The Brand Through Metaphor

After the category discussion, turn the conversation inward with an exercise called Visual Brand Driver. Each stakeholder selects images representing the company across unrelated categories: transport, typeface, activity, furniture, mood, object, animal, architecture, and drink.

The instructions stress that the choices should reflect the company, not personal taste. If the company were a form of transport, would it be a quiet electric car, a high-speed train, a private jet, a bicycle, or a delivery van? If it were furniture, would it be a soft lounge chair, a precise modular desk, or a heavy boardroom table?

After choosing, each person adds four or five adjectives explaining their selections. The reasoning matters more than the image itself, because the same object carries different meanings for different people. A train might signal speed, structure, reliability, mass accessibility, or fixed routes. A lounge chair might suggest comfort, calm, informality, or a lack of urgency.

Thinking through metaphor and association yields a deeper layer of brand perception than direct descriptions. Patterns and contradictions become visible: one person sees the brand as refined and calm, another as energetic and experimental; one reads precision and structure, another warmth and flexibility. These differences are not flaws but raw material — evidence of what must be clarified before concept work starts.

The exercise also separates brand perception from aesthetic preference. A stakeholder may personally love an image, but if it doesn’t describe the company, it belongs outside the discussion. Throughout branding, the guiding question must always be “Does this express the right thing about the brand?” rather than “Do we like this?”

From Strategy to Visual Principles

After the workshop surfaces the team's core assumptions, the next meeting shifts into a working layer between strategy and design. This is not yet the first identity concept; it is an opportunity for the client to react to perception, visual principles, and early asset directions before the designer commits to full concepts.

That meeting typically revolves around three connected layers:

1. Look and feel — what the brand should feel like
2. Design code — how key brand ideas become visual principles
3. Branding assets — early choices for typography, color, logo direction, imagery, and illustration

These layers move the conversation from perception toward practical design boundaries.

Look and Feel as Perception Boards

Look and feel boards are not mood boards of visuals the team happens to like. They are perception boards, built from references grounded in the workshop: desired perception, category tension, competitor codes, stakeholder disagreements, and brand character.

If the brand needs to feel trustworthy, modern, and human, the board should force a discussion about which kind of trust, modernity, and humanity fits. Is the brand calm and institutional, or warm and accessible? Is progressiveness expressed through precision, or through a more expressive editorial tone?

The goal is for the client to respond to perception before reacting to a logo, palette, or finished visual system.

Translating Ideas into a Design Code

Design code makes direction concrete by converting key brand ideas into visual principles the team can test.

For a German parenting app, personalized support for your unique journey might become organic shapes, handwritten lines, and softer compositions. Parenting is messy and magical might translate to soft gradients, layered imagery, and playful irregularity. Research-backed support for real life could introduce doctor calls, data snapshots, infographics, and editorial layouts that lend credibility.

For a PR agency serving prop tech companies, momentum in motion might suggest lines, arrows, ripple effects, or motion blur. Springboard might become a lift-off moment and elastic visual energy. Building blocks could manifest as modular shapes or stacked compositions.

At this point the team is not selecting the final graphic expression. It is testing whether the visual metaphors hold up before concept design begins.

Brand Assets: The Building Blocks

The final layer brings the conversation down to the concrete pieces of identity: typography, color, logo style, photography, illustration, and graphic language.

Here the team can tackle questions such as:

• Should typography feel editorial, technical, warm, precise, expressive, or restrained?
• Should the palette follow category codes or create deliberate contrast?
• Should the logo be a quiet typographic mark, a flexible symbol, or a more expressive character?
• Should photography feel documentary, polished, intimate, product-led, everyday, or aspirational?
• Should illustration explain complex ideas, add warmth, or become a distinctive brand language?

This approach gives the designer boundaries without making the final identity formulaic. Concept design still comes next, but the team is no longer starting from abstract adjectives or unspoken expectations.

A Pre-Concept Reality Check

Before exploring the first concept, it is worth pausing to confirm the team has enough shared direction. The goal is not to decide everything in advance, but to ensure the designer is not starting from vague language, hidden assumptions, or lingering disagreements.

Ask whether the team has:

• A clear understanding of what the brand needs to communicate.
• A defined brand character.
• A shared sense of what that character means — and what it does not mean.
• Visual references tied to perception, not taste.
• Key brand ideas translated into visual principles.
• Early direction for typography, color, imagery, and graphic language.
• Documented areas of agreement and disagreement.
• A clear sense of which concept directions would be wrong before designing them.

The final point is especially valuable. A solid pre-concept phase clarifies not only what to explore, but also what to avoid: directions that would be too expected, too cold, too playful, too conservative, too loud, too generic, or too far from what the audience will trust.

With those boundaries named, evaluating the first concept becomes easier. The conversation moves from "I like it" or "I do not like it" to "Does this express the brand we agreed on?"

Making the First Concept a Next Step, Not a Guess

The first concept should not feel like a shot in the dark or a dramatic reveal. It should feel like the logical continuation of a direction the team already understands.

That does not mean stripping intuition, experimentation, or creative risk out of branding. It means aiming those qualities at a sharper problem. When brand character is clarified, visual perception is tested, ideas are turned into design principles, and the early building blocks of identity are on the table, the designer can explore with far more confidence.

Pre-concept work does not need to make the final identity predictable. It needs to make the conversation around it more substantive. Instead of judging work against a private expectation, the team can ask the question that matters: does this visual direction express what the brand needs to become?