Bob Sheard: So with communication design, one of the characters in my deep and dark past that helped with me to understand this more was the art director at ID magazine, Stephen Male, where we worked on with them Levi's and Caterpillar, and it was all about with him. It was all about, you know, the font selection, the typographical selection, the product photography and layouts at the composition, how all of those tell the implicit and explicit stories that add up to the narrative, and so our job is to connect those to brand as well. So, in terms of making us think, the think choices in brand and communication design are typography, they are layout, they are product photography and they are graphics. So I'll give you some examples in typography, the typography we use for Mountain Force, which is a Swiss engineered ski range, was all about precision. We chose a typography that represented precision because this was precision apparel from Switzerland. If you look at newspaper print and typography, you look at the way things are created there. The Times represents authority. The font Franklin Gothic actually invented by the first independent newspaper man in America, Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers is all about clarity and easy to understand. If you look at layouts, layout makers think with Inov8, we wanted people to think that this brand is about adventure and it's about stepping off the map. So when we did our layouts, everything was centered around the edge and bleeding off the edge, even the typography and the imagery. So it felt like you were looking off the edge of the screen or off the edge of the page. A brand that we worked with was where we wanted the layout to look balanced. Implicitly balanced was New Balance. So you design the layout so it respects one of the key facets of the values, which is living a life in balance. In terms of the product photography, product photography is there to inform, a little bit to engage, but a lot to inform. It's there to inform us about the product and it's there to inform us about the values of the brand that create the behaviour that creates that product. So with Odlo, a craftsman brand, we chose to go down to the molecular detail in terms of product photography, because we wanted to demonstrate the micro detail and commitment to micro detail that that brand had in terms of delivering great product. With Leica, again, it's going into the detail to demonstrate the precision, that German engineering that goes into that product. So you can see how product photography selections can make us think. And then graphics, New Balance, with the graphic design we chose on that, we chose to entirely use the golden ratio with New Balance because it represents the balance in nature. So using Phi in the number 1.168, which is the golden ratio, which is all about the geometry and symmetry and beauty that exists in nature. And we chose that because that represents the kind of balance that would be reflected of New Balance. And then, if you look at the sort of uncompromising camo and graphics of Bathing Ape, they just represent and make us think self respect. So, in terms of our think levers in comms design, it's typography, it's layout, it's product photography and it's graphics. Then we moved to the feel levers in brand design. In Levi's you see the red tab on imagery. It makes us feel this is an original. In Apple, when you see the pulsating lights or you see the Apple logo, it makes us somehow feel magical. Image photography should make us feel. Obviously that's one of the biggest and most obviously levers to pull. Rapha's image photography of the Kings of the Pain makes us feel this is an authentic version of road cycling. Patagonia, their image photography just a small person in a wide epic vista makes us feel that this brand is earthly conscious. The font selections are critically important in terms of making us feel Arc'teryx. Their font selections, they're sort of very modern serifs, make us feel this is a progressive brand. Whereas when we're looking at someone like a Dalesford Organic, the font there is making us feel that this is a brand that's open and a brand that's welcoming. When we look at colour, this also demonstrates brand colours as huge in terms of demonstrating a sense of feeling. With Caterpillar, for example, yellow and black has becomes synonymous with work, outdoor work and work wear. Whereas Tiffany Blue, it's their blue, no one else uses it, it's exclusive. It makes us feel exclusive. So that's it really in terms of the levers that you pull for comms. It's colour, font, image and branding to make us feel that we belong to that brand. It's graphics, product photography, layouts and typography that makes us think about what that brand actually does. And those then connect to the emotional and rational values and the conviction and charisma, and integrate then, once you've established that you can integrate it with the product components and you'll end up with a unified and integrated thinking that works in our consciousness, making us think, and works in our subconsciousness, making us feel.‍

Michael Campion: Yeah, I think that unification and the integration that's where the magic lies, because I think a lot of people it would be disrespectful of me or you or anyone really to say that a lot of people that work at brands haven't considered these various components. I think they do. I just think they often think of them in isolation. Right, they will think in very considered terms about the layout or the typography or the use of colour, but they won't think about necessarily how that integrates with their brand vision and the brand strategy and the long-term plan. Correct?

Bob Sheard: Yeah, yeah. So what you kind of want to do is if on one side of your company you've got, if you're a vehicle company and you're designing the interior of the vehicle and you're considering how do I want people to feel when they sit in this car, and if you want them to feel exhilarated, it's really helpful if, on the other side of the company, when someone's working out sort of the layouts of their car manuals or the layouts of the advertising, the typography they choose or the other layouts that they choose also makes them you know they're using exhilaration as a centre point for that, and then ultimately you'll have an integrated brand expression. So it's very and you're right, people do think about it. They unconsciously do because they're designers, but what they need is the kind of freedom of a very tight brief that enables them to deploy their entire bandwidth around delivering that emotional experience. And that emotional experience needs to be common across the different media that you're using to tell the story, whether it's product design or communication design.

Michael Campion: Yeah, totally. The biggest problem I think that's popping out to me when it comes to integration is just that diseconomies of scale that you get in large companies. Right, you've got people over here and people over there and they just don't talk because the company's too big. I think if something small and beautiful and it's a startup and all those marketing and the design people and the engineers and the CEO, they're all in the same room. It's easier to kind of have that collective group think, whereas I think of someone like I don't know a Volvo or a Renault who I know you've worked with both. It must be so difficult to get all of those people singing from the same hymn sheet, but I guess that is the magic, there in lies the magic.

Bob Sheard: Yeah, and that's why these structures are really important for them. But you know, this work is designed to help people who are either small and medium enterprises or startups, and so, them starting with this. When it's a smaller team, or even just one person, thinking like this enables them to think more smartly, work more quickly and create more brand accurate solutions when it comes to digital design, comms design, product design, culture design, whatever it might be.