Why Brand Identity Work Should Start Before Figma Opens
Most brand identity failures aren't visible in the final logo. They're visible in the six months after launch, when the marketing team quietly ignores the guidelines and reverts to whatever felt safe. A recent Smashing Magazine piece names the phase where this goes wrong: the gap between strategy and concept, before anyone opens Figma.
The article frames this as a distinct "pre-concept phase" — research into brand context, stakeholder conversations designed to surface hidden assumptions, and the work of building shared direction before a single visual idea gets made. It's a useful reframing because most design education, and most portfolio culture, skips straight to the concept reveal. Nobody posts their stakeholder interview notes on Instagram.
Why this matters now
Brand identity work has become faster and more templated over the last decade. AI-assisted moodboarding, rapid logo generation, and client pressure to "see options" quickly all push studios toward concepting sooner. That's precisely why naming the pre-concept phase matters: it's the part of the process most likely to get compressed or skipped when timelines tighten.
The piece's core claim — that hidden assumptions need to be surfaced with stakeholders before design starts — sounds obvious, but it addresses a real and specific failure mode. A CEO says the brand should feel "premium." A marketing director says it should feel "approachable." Both sign off on the same strategy deck without realising they mean different things. The designer then builds a concept that satisfies neither, discovers this in round two feedback, and burns a revision cycle relitigating something that should have been resolved in a kickoff conversation.
What's contestable
The harder question the article doesn't fully resolve is how to run this phase without it becoming its own bottleneck. Stakeholder research and assumption-surfacing can expand indefinitely — there's always another interview, another workshop, another round of internal alignment. Studios need a clear stopping point: a documented set of decisions (tone, competitive positioning, non-negotiables) that everyone signs off on before concepting begins, not an open-ended discovery process. Without that boundary, "strategy before concept" becomes an excuse for scope creep rather than a discipline.
There's also a craft argument worth making explicit: the pre-concept phase isn't just about avoiding client conflict. It's where the designer decides what the visual language is actually for. A wordmark, a colour system, a grid — these are answers to questions. If the questions haven't been asked properly, the visual system ends up decorative rather than functional. Type choice becomes a matter of taste instead of a decision tied to how the brand needs to behave across a retail environment, a product UI, or a piece of packaging on a crowded shelf.
The practical takeaway
For working designers, the useful move here isn't philosophical — it's procedural. Build the pre-concept phase into the proposal and the timeline as a named, billable stage, not an informal chat before the "real" work starts. Document the assumptions stakeholders reveal, even the uncomfortable ones, and get sign-off on them in writing. That document becomes the reference point when a client says a concept "doesn't feel right" three rounds in — it lets the conversation return to agreed strategy rather than sliding into subjective taste.
The brands that hold up over time are rarely the ones with the cleverest concept reveal. They're the ones where the visual direction was answering a question everyone had already agreed on. Read the full piece at Smashing Magazine.