Jessica Hische: commitment

Transcript context

…Let's actually talk about the work that you put into updating my logo and brand. From that, we can spin off into lessons and insights that you have along these lines. Overall, just high level, what's the process you go through to go through a logo refresh? Sure, of course. Super high level, it's figuring out what the goals are. Some people have a goal where they want their customers to not notice it at all. They're like, "Oh, everybody loves this, but I, the person with a design eye, can see all the problems with it. I need to roll something out that fixes the problems that I see but that no one else really notices." If that's one approach to it, which is a very close in refresh where we're just trying out little things to make it feel custom or fixing things that have come up when stress-tested, whether it looks crazy when you scale it and looks like horsey and heavy-handed when you scale it too big or when you scale it too small, you lose a lot of legibility and stuff like that. That's what would be a really close in exploration. For other people, they might have bigger goals where they're about to pivot the company to try to attract a different audience or things like that. They might have this really cool and successful group of people that are super users but they're trying to expand it, so then it's about, "What can we do to shift the vibe to make it include these new people without excluding our core folks?" My first round is figuring out what that scope is, how experimental, how broad are we going to go for that first round, because then everything else cascades from there. If we go really broad for the first round, then we're in this process of narrowing down the scope as we go down. Whereas if we go really close in for the first round, we're already just talking about really technical stuff. This is another thing that is a little bit unique to me that not everybody else does, but I will hand off files to clients to try in situ really early on if what we're trying to do is solve utilitarian issues. Most other people are like, "No, you don't get the files until we do the final because I don't want you to run away with this or whatever." There has to be some trust with it. Yeah, figure out what we're trying to accomplish and always keep those goals in mind, and then scope out the process based on what those goals are. For each round, we're addressing different things. First round might be about just capturing the overall look and trying things as broad as we can, and then the next round is, "Okay. Well, now we have generally a look that we want, but is it the right weight? Is it the right letter height? Do we have enough details?" That kind of thing, and then we get narrower and nerdier as we go along in the process. Awesome. In the experience of my podcast logo, I was an ass. At the end of it, I'm like, "No, this isn't right," because we narrowed, narrowed, narrowed, and then I was like, "No, I'm not feeling it," and then we unnarrowed it and went back. [inaudible 00:15:02]…

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