Design, and especially identity design – but really all types of design that depend on recognizability – is not like auteurship, or artistry.

As a designer, you are not speaking in your own voice – you need to find the voice of the client, and understand how that voice resonates (or doesn’t resonate) with the intended audience.

This means that your job as a designer is more akin to that of a casting director.

You need for your design to play a role, and to express itself in certain ways that are consistent with the script – i.e., the client’s brand strategy. And if the client is unsure about that strategy – meaning, they are essentially shooting a movie without a script – you need to define the role for them, and find the right actor. Your design needs to embody the personality that you would advise the client to assume.

You need to conduct a Casting Call.

You need to define the client’s visual persona, and articulate how it should act when it’s on the stage, in order to be able to convey the right message in a credible and convincing way.

Some clients will come to you and ask for a certain actor: “We’d like for Al Pacino to play this role!”. Meaning, they come to you with an outside-in idea of someone who they think would represent them, when the actor’s job is to FORGET about who they are, not act as themselves, and instead embody the ROLE.

For that reason, you ought to take all such suggestions with a huge scoop of salt.

Treating a visual brand identity like a known commodity, like a well-known actor, means the audience are at risk of only seeing THAT actor; seeing THAT face – not experience the role that the script actually calls for.

This is the same as applying a recognizable ”style” to a brand identity. ”We want clean and modern”, say many corporations, afraid of stepping out of line with expectations and industry tropes. But their identity, as defined by the brand strategy, may not express itself best in a clean and modern ”style”, just like Al Pacino might not be the right face, or the right voice, for that role.

Think about your brand as if it’s an actor about to get on the stage, and then define the role based on how you need the audience to experience and react to your brand. Make sure your designer conducts a casting call, and casts the right actor in the role – an actor which will be able to let audiences see past their recognizable face, and experience the persona they are trying to express.

If your brand identity design does the job right, it will be able to embody the true persona of the brand, as opposed to pretending, and putting on stage clothes while still being recognizable as someone else’s borrowed personality.