Brand Design with All Good Studios

Design Agency in Leeds | Branding Agency | ALLGOOD

As part of my continued professional development and learning, I joined this online event, organised by Right Aligned Academy and interviewing Paul Dodd, Founder of All Good Studios in relation to how they run their branding process and looking particularly at their work with the brand 'Oatier' - a brand of Oat Milk.

As my Business and Marketing degree concludes, at the same time I am beginning my UX Product design diploma, understanding real-life design processes and challenges are of great interest to me, and I couldn't miss the opportunity to join this online event.

Paul Dodd talked through the processes he, and his team, use when a design brief comes to them from workshopping and brainstorming through to prototyping and launching. He explained the timeframes and activities they work through - and how long (2 weeks) they typically add to a project when creating the brand name is also part of the brief. - he also talked around loving a pun which I related with greatly.

Particular point of interest: Paul discussed the start of the process as the stage where his team still pick up pen and paper, I found this interesting as I had assumed creation might be 100% digital. It was a relief to know there is still space for sketching and value in concept creation both on paper, and digitally.

Paul also spoke about a stage where all logo/concepts ideas are put in to black and white as this can help focus the mind on understanding which ideas are working well, which have been over-used in a market space already, or which simply don't stand out.

My question to Paul: I asked Paul 'how, if it had, AI had changed the initial workshopping phase of the branding process'. He was keen to answer that AI had little to no affect on any stage of the design process and that it was not intelligent or creative enough to be asking the right questions during a workshopping phase, nor was it creative enough to be generating ideas at any stage. Whilst I thought it was interesting to understand Paul's adamance that there was no change to processes, despite AI changing many industry landscapes, I wonder if this may also be indicative to the threat that AI is causing especially when AI can in fact be greeted with open-arms by other designers.

I frequently listen to Patricia Reiners' UX podcast on Spotify (see here) who is an advocate for AI and the use of it's tools as a powerful way to improve processes and become more efficient in a fast-paced and changing design future. I can't help but lean more towards a feeling that AI isn't going anywhere and I therefore question the competitive advantage Paul and All Good will be able to maintain without being open minded to utilising AI tools.