Writing
Notes on brand, taste & not breaking.
Most of this starts as a daily post and ends up here, brand strategy, creative leadership, and what AI is doing to both. Opinions, defended.
The archive
- Brand Systems & Governance
The Next Reader of Your Brand Book Is a Machine SLUG: the-next-reader-of-your-brand-book-is-a-machine
Google's DESIGN.md turns brand guidelines into a file coding agents read before every task. The hex codes are the easy part. The written reasoning is where brands hold or drift.
- Creative Leadership
Who Trains the Art Director of 2035?
AI is absorbing the junior work that used to teach the craft. Agencies are saving a salary today and borrowing against their next generation of creative leads.
- Brand Strategy
Your Positioning Has the Same Tenure as Your CMO SLUG: your-positioning-has-the-same-tenure-as-your-cmo
Boots has launched a new brand platform roughly every time it hired a new marketing chief. A positioning that resets on a hiring schedule was never the strategy.
- AI x Branding
Your Support Bot Is Your Most Quoted Spokesperson SLUG: your-support-bot-is-your-most-quoted-spokesperson
When an AI agent answers your customers, every reply is a brand statement with your name on it. Air Canada and Cursor already found out what that costs.
- Hot Take
The most viral branding stat of the decade is fake. You have probably repeated it.
- Wildcard / Hot Take
Nobody Is Buying Your Brand Values
Values pages are written for employees and investors. Customers buy the product and the feeling, not the manifesto.
- Creative Leadership
The Brief Is the Only Thing You Actually Control
Most bad work is a brief that failed before anyone opened the design tool. Writing it is the creative act.
- Brand Strategy
What You Refuse to Sell Is Your Strategy
Positioning is subtraction. The customer you turn away defines the brand more than the one you chase.
- Brand Systems & Governance
Your Brand Has a Voice. Nobody Wrote It Down.
Every brand system governs the colors and abandons the words. That is why your brand sounds like five people.
- AI x Branding
Your Next Customer Asks a Machine, Not Google
Discovery moved from the search results to the synthesized answer. Strategy now means being the brand the model names.
- AI x Branding
Coca-Cola Already Answered the AI Branding Question.
AI can generate the asset. It cannot hold the brand. The Coke holiday ads proved it two years running.
- Wildcard / Hot Take
Stop Trying to Make Your Brand Weird
The 2026 cure for boring branding is not weirdness. Weird-for-its-own-sake is just safe in a costume.
- Creative Leadership
The Hardest Part of the Job Is Killing Good Work
Anyone can kill bad work. Creative leadership is knowing which good idea to kill so the great one ships.
- Brand Strategy
The Safe Rebrand Is the Expensive One
2025 was the year of forgettable rebrands. Playing it safe costs more than getting it wrong.
- Brand Systems & Governance
Your Design System Will Die in Production
A brand stays consistent because someone owns the no, not because the Figma file is tidy.
- Brand Strategy
Your brand isn't your logo. It's the part that survives the redesign.
The thing you keep when everything visual changes, that's the brand. Everything else is paint.
- AI x Branding
AI didn't kill the designer. It killed the design that looked like everyone else's.
When everyone can generate competent, competent stops being a moat. Taste is the only edge left.
- Brand Systems
One source of truth, or one expensive rebrand a year. Pick.
Why governance, not creativity, is the part that decides whether a brand scales.
Published daily and archived here from the content engine.
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