Rebrand or Refresh? Read This Before You Start Over

Of everything I brought with me from painting into design, the thing I rely on most is also the least flattering: the knowledge that my own eye stops being trustworthy after I’ve looked at something for long enough. It isn’t that I begin to see flaws. It’s that I stop seeing the thing at all, and what remains is a vague dissatisfaction that feels like judgment but is really only fatigue. I’ve learned to treat that feeling with suspicion in the studio. I’ve been slower to notice that most of the people who write to me about rebranding are describing the same feeling, and mistaking it for the same thing.

The messages tend to arrive in pairs. The first says something like “I think it’s time for a rebrand,” with a confidence that suggests the decision is already made. The second, usually a few minutes behind it, says “or maybe I’m just tired of looking at it, I honestly can’t tell.” I’ve come to trust the second message more than the first, because it’s asking the right question, and because it’s the one I recognize.

The problem of looking too long

You see your brand more than anyone alive. It’s in the corner of every invoice, at the top of every email, on every proposal and every post, and after a few years of that it becomes something closer to wallpaper than to design. Your clients, meanwhile, meet it a handful of times a year, and each time it does the quiet work it was built to do. It tells them they’re in the right place. It tells them nothing has changed, that the person they trusted is still here, that this is a considered business run by a considered person. The familiarity that exhausts you is precisely what reassures them. It isn’t two qualities. It’s one, seen from opposite sides of the table.

So before anything else, I’d ask you to separate two questions that arrive feeling like one. Am I tired of this? And is this no longer doing its job? The first is a state of mind, and it will pass, and there are far cheaper ways to address it than redesigning the face of your business. The second is a structural problem, and it won’t pass, and no amount of looking away resolves it. A rebrand is a reasonable answer to the second question. It is a very expensive answer to the first.

When the eye is right

None of this is an argument against rebranding. I’ve led a good number of them, and a few are among the work I’m proudest of. But when I look back at the ones that were clearly right, they came from a small number of places, and fatigue was never one of them.

Most often the business had changed and the brand had stayed where it was. This happens so gradually that it’s nearly invisible from inside. A practice that began with one person now has a team. A service that was offered at one price now sits at a different tier entirely, alongside something more considered and more expensive. A business that once took whoever booked now knows, with some precision, who it’s for. When the brand still describes the business you had three years ago, that isn’t vanity or restlessness. It’s a gap, and it costs you quietly every time the right person finds you and concludes, without quite knowing why, that you aren’t what she was looking for.

Sometimes two things need to become one. Earlier this year I worked with a woman who had, over time, built two separate identities for what had always really been a single practice. Two names, two looks, two of everything, and she was worn down by maintaining the seam between them. That was a rebrand, and not because either identity was unattractive. The structure was wrong, and structure is the one thing a refresh cannot reach.

And occasionally the brand is working against the person who owns it. It draws price-sensitive enquiries when the work has moved well beyond that. It looks unmistakably like the year it was made. Clients say, kindly, that they were surprised by how good the experience was, which is a compliment with a diagnosis folded inside it. If your brand is lowering expectations that you then have to exceed in person, you’re paying for that in every first conversation, and you’ll keep paying until the brand catches up to the work.

What isn’t on that list is worth noticing. A brand you saw and liked better. A designer you follow who just rebranded and made yours feel old. The plain fact of having looked at it for four years. These are real, and I’ve felt every one of them about my own studio, and not one of them is a reason.

The middle ground, which is larger than it looks

If none of that describes your situation, and yet the restlessness persists, there’s a great deal of room between living with a brand and burning it down, and I’ll admit that room is where I do some of the work I care about most.

The photography almost always comes first. It’s the largest lever and, for reasons I’ve never fully understood, the one people reach for last. The same identity carrying new, properly directed images reads as a new brand to everyone except its owner, because the images are what people actually look at. A logo is a signature at the bottom of the page. The photographs are the face.

Then the words. Brands go stale in their language long before they go stale in their visuals, and if your About page still describes what you were doing in 2022, that’s what feels off, and no typeface is going to fix it.

Then the palette, adjusted rather than replaced. Retire the accent colour you’ve come to resent. Introduce the one you’ve come to love. Keep the one or two that carry the recognition. People will feel that something has shifted and won’t be able to name it, which is exactly the effect you want.

And then, often, what’s missing. A brand can feel thin not because what exists is wrong but because there isn’t enough of it. A mark, a colour, and nothing beneath them. No secondary type, no patterns, no set of real mockups, no consistent way of building a post or a proposal. A system laid on top of an identity you already have will feel like a transformation and cost a fraction of one.

I should say plainly that I make less money recommending this route, and that I recommend it anyway. A refresh done well keeps everything you’ve spent years building. A rebrand done for the wrong reason discards it and then asks you to begin building again, and I’ve watched that be far more painful than anyone expected going in.

A way of borrowing someone else’s eye

When a client can’t tell which situation she’s in, and most can’t, I ask her to do the one thing that reliably works, which is to stop looking at her brand as herself.

Open the website, the Instagram, a recent proposal, a business card. Look at them as the one person you would most like to hire you. Not a customer in the abstract. Her, specifically, the one whose name in your inbox would make your week. Would she understand what you do within a few seconds? Would she feel this had been made for someone like her? Would the price she’d guess be roughly the price you charge? Does this look like the business you’re running now, or the one you started?

If she’d say yes to all four, you’re tired, and that’s allowed. Commission new photographs, stay off Instagram for a few weeks, and look again in the spring. If she’d hesitate on one or two, it’s a refresh, and I’d wager on the words or the images before anything else. If she’d say no to most of them, you’ve outgrown the brand, and in that case a rebrand isn’t indulgence. It’s maintenance, and it deserves to be done properly.

What I do in the studio

When I reach the point in a painting where I can no longer see it, I turn the canvas to the wall and leave it there for a week or two. When I turn it back, one of two things usually happens. Either I can see it again and simply finish it, or I can finally see the one thing that’s wrong, and it is almost never the whole painting. It’s a passage. A colour that has started to argue with the one beside it. Something that needs an afternoon rather than a beginning.

I’d offer your brand the same courtesy. Turn it to the wall. Come back to it as someone else. Then change the thing that’s actually wrong, and only that.

And if, having done all of that, you turn it back around and find it really is the whole painting, you’ll know, and you’ll be deciding with a rested eye and a clear reason. That is the only kind of rebrand I’d ever want to begin with someone.

Thinking about elevating your own brand? The thing that makes you unforgettable is already there. Let’s build it together.

GUIDES AND RESOURCES

ABOUT THIS POST

This post is written by Donata Delano – A Web Designer, Professional Artist and Architect based in Burlington, Canada. She specializing in visual communication and web design, creating branding solutions and websites that are thoughtful, unique and aesthetically pleasing.

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