Start with one photograph

Before we draw a single letter, we look for one photograph that feels like the brand. It can be ours or a reference. It is never a moodboard of forty images. Forty images give everyone in the room something to agree with, which means nobody has to decide anything. One image forces a choice, and the choice is where the work starts.

We have run identity projects this way since the studio opened in 2016. It began as a habit of Mei's from book design, where a cover often starts from one picture and everything else has to sit next to it. It turned out to work just as well for carmakers, hotels and charities.

One picture, many decisions

A single image answers more questions than a brief. Is the light warm or cold? Is the subject close or far away? Is the frame busy or empty? Is there a person in it, and are they looking at us? Each answer becomes a rule we can test later: a colour temperature, a typographic density, a way of cropping, a tone of voice.

When we started the Arlo Motors launch, the client sent us a thirty page brief. We read it, then asked them to send us one photograph of a car they wished they had made. They sent a dark side profile lit by a single red tail light. That picture decided the black ground, the narrow type and the slow pace of the launch film before we had opened a design file.

It also gave us a way to say no. When someone suggested a bright sky for the hero shot, we could put the two pictures side by side and the answer was obvious to everyone, including the person who suggested it.

How we choose it

We ask the client to bring five pictures, and we bring five of our own. Then we spend an afternoon removing them one by one. Nobody is allowed to argue for an image. You can only argue against one, and you have to say why.

The last picture on the table is rarely the most beautiful. It is the one that nobody could find a reason to remove. That makes it a good foundation, because it has already survived the objections that would otherwise come up three months later.

Sometimes the winner is a phone snapshot. The Halden riding wear project started from a blurry photo the founder took of a rider leaving a petrol station at night. We never used that picture in the final work, but every shoot that followed tried to catch the same feeling of someone about to leave.

What it does to the rest of the project

Once the photograph is chosen, it goes on the wall of the studio and at the top of every presentation. New people on the team see it first. When a designer is stuck on a layout, they hold it up next to the picture and the answer is usually there.

It also keeps the project small. A brand built from one image does not need fifteen colours or four typefaces. It needs the few things that picture already contains. Our guidelines are shorter because of it, and our clients use them more.

We are often asked whether this limits the work later, when the brand has to stretch to a new product or a new market. In our experience it does the opposite. A clear starting point makes it easier to tell which changes belong and which ones are noise.

When it does not work

This method fails when the client is not ready to choose. If the company itself has not decided what it is, no photograph will decide it for them. In those cases we stop, run a short strategy sprint, and come back to the pictures afterwards.

It also fails when the picture is chosen for the wrong reason, usually because it is fashionable. Trends move faster than brands. If an image only feels right because everyone else is using something like it, we take it off the table.

Try it yourself

If you are starting a brand, a site or even a single campaign, try the exercise before you hire anyone. Pick five pictures, remove four, and write one sentence about why the last one stayed. Bring that sentence to your first meeting with a studio. It will save you a week, and it will tell the studio more about you than any brief.