The most important decisions in a rebrand happen before anyone starts designing.
There’s a moment in the life of many architecture and design firms when someone looks at the website, the logo, or the latest proposal and says, “This just doesn’t feel like us anymore.”
And they may be right.
Perhaps the firm has grown, leadership has changed, or the work has evolved. Maybe the business is heading into new markets, but its reputation is still firmly rooted in the old ones. Sometimes the brand simply hasn’t kept pace with the firm behind it.
Whatever prompted the conversation, the next step is often surprisingly predictable: everyone starts talking about what the new brand should look like.
We get it. The creative work is exciting. We’re designers, too. But before we start collecting inspiration, exploring logos, or debating colors, we have a more important question to answer.
What, exactly, are we trying to change?
Because “we need a new website” isn’t necessarily a business problem. Neither is “our logo looks dated.” Those may be perfectly reasonable observations, but they don’t tell us what’s happening beneath the surface.
Is the firm struggling to communicate its value? Has its client base changed? Is leadership trying to establish a new direction? Are prospective clients misunderstanding what the firm does, or are the right clients simply not finding it?
The answers matter. A firm with a strong reputation and an outdated website needs something very different from a firm entering an unfamiliar market or navigating an ownership transition. And sometimes what looks like a branding problem is actually a question of business strategy, leadership alignment, or market position.
That’s why we believe branding is a business decision. The creative work needs to support where the firm is going, not simply make it look better along the way.
The interesting stuff happens before the design
One of the first things we do when working with a firm is get curious. Really curious.
We want to know how the business got here, what leadership wants to accomplish, which clients the firm serves best, and what makes its approach distinctive. We talk about values and culture, but we also talk about competitors, business development, growth, and the opportunities the firm wants to pursue.
And we don’t just ask leadership.
Clients often have a remarkably clear perspective on what makes a firm valuable. Employees can tell us how the firm actually operates, which isn’t always quite the same as how leadership describes it. Looking at competitors helps us understand which claims are genuinely differentiating and which ones every firm in the market is making.
Sometimes the findings confirm what everyone already believes. Other times, they reveal something unexpected.
Take Kelly Taylor, who spent years considering whether to remove her name from her firm. On the surface, that sounds like a naming decision. But as the business grew, Kelly recognized that its identity was still tied closely to her personally, even as an entire team was doing the work. The name no longer reflected the business she had built—or the one she wanted it to become.
That’s a much bigger conversation than what to put on the front door.
And it’s exactly why we ask so many questions before we start designing. A firm’s brand needs to reflect not only what it does today, but where the business is headed and who will be responsible for taking it there.
The point of discovery isn’t to collect enough opinions to make everyone happy. It’s to get a clearer picture of the business, its reputation, and the opportunities ahead. From there, we can make informed decisions about what the brand needs to communicate.
And yes, that sometimes means having conversations that are a little more challenging than choosing a color palette. (Better to have them now than halfway through a design presentation.)
Give the designers something to work with
Once we’ve done that thinking, we can translate it into direction for the creative team. This is where the creative brief comes in.
It’s not a particularly glamorous term, and most firm leaders don’t wake up thinking they need one. But a good creative brief does an important job: it connects the business decisions we’ve made to the design work we’re about to undertake.
It establishes who we’re trying to reach, what we want people to understand about the firm, how we want to be perceived, and what the new identity needs to accomplish. It also gives the creative team room to explore how best to express those ideas.
That last part is important. A brief isn’t a prescription for a logo, a font, or a color palette. If we’ve already made every creative decision, we haven’t left much room for the designers to do their jobs. Instead, we’re giving them a meaningful problem to solve.
We’re also giving leadership a better way to evaluate the work.
Without that shared foundation, creative reviews can quickly become a referendum on personal taste. One principal loves the blue. Another thinks the typography is too modern. Someone wants to know why we can’t just keep the old logo. Those reactions are human, but they aren’t particularly helpful.
When everyone understands what the brand is meant to accomplish, the conversation changes. We can ask whether the work reflects the firm’s personality, communicates its value, connects with its intended audiences, and supports its future direction. We can still disagree—we just have something more useful to disagree about.
And when the creative team brings back an idea that surprises us, we have the context to recognize whether it’s a departure from the strategy or an exciting expression of it.
The goal isn’t a new logo
Of course, a successful rebrand may include a new logo. And a website. And proposals, presentations, signage, messaging, photography, and all the other places a firm’s identity shows up.
But those are the expressions of the brand, not the reason for changing it.
The real opportunity is to bring the way a firm presents itself into alignment with the business it has become and the one it wants to build.
That takes some honest assessment, a willingness to challenge assumptions, and a few important decisions before the creative work begins.
We love the moment when a new identity comes together. Seeing a firm’s story take shape visually is one of the most satisfying parts of our work.
But the best creative work doesn’t begin with someone asking, “What should our new logo look like?”
It begins with a much better question. “What do we need our brand to do?”
Not sure whether your brand needs a refresh or a bigger rethink?
Our AVEC Brand Review helps you understand what’s working, what isn’t, and where your brand may be out of step with your business. It’s a good place to start before deciding what needs to change.
