Stop saying you want a website like Stripe’s
What exactly are you going to take from it? Here’s where to look instead 🤘
Part 3 of 5. This week I’m putting what I believe about brand in writing, one question a day.
When I ask founders which brand inspires them, I get the same three answers. Stripe. Linear. Apple.
So I ask the follow-up: what about it?
Usually, I get “it’s clean.”
Fine. Let’s think about it tactically: what exactly are you going to use from Stripe’s website?
The multicolored ribbon in the hero? Don’t think so.
Their typefaces? Maybe, but why?
The interactive visuals? You didn’t make them, and they don’t relate to your product at all.
The color palette? It matches all of your competitors who had the same idea.
The grid structure? I guess, but again, why?
Apart from aspiring to their level of polish, you can’t take a single one of the pieces that make it without being a total rip-off. The problem isn’t that you want to look like Stripe. It’s that you’ve limited your inspiration to the same unicorns your customers and competitors can spot in an instant.
What I’m after is the overlap. The thing you genuinely love that also makes people feel the way you want them to feel about you.
Either half on its own fails. Love without the feeling is self-indulgent: you might adore brutalist architecture, but it won’t make anyone feel warm and taken care of (assuming that's what you want). The feeling without the love is generic, and you won’t defend the design decisions once the committee starts poking at it.
This is why I believe great brands aren’t created, they’re stolen, just never from your own category.
Here’s how I find that overlap with clients, step-by-step:
1. Write the obituary
This one’s from Marty Neumeier’s Zag. Imagine your best customer giving the eulogy for your brand, and don’t settle for “they made me feel supported.” I want personality. “They had a sense of humor that wasn’t afraid to toe the line.” “They carried themselves with an edge and a hint of danger that made them interesting.”
2. Find your buyer’s worry
Every purchase says something about the person making it. Ordering Domino’s says something different than the hole-in-the-wall place or the fancy Neapolitan spot. If you sell email software, maybe your buyer is worried about looking stodgy, or corporate, or like they’re not having any fun. Your visuals have to put that worry to rest.
3. Name the tropes
Go look at your competitors. Does everybody use blue? Does everybody say the same three things? Write down how they feel, what’s missing emotionally, and then write “we don’t want to feel like that.”
4. Define the feeling, then find it in the wild
Pick attributes from the spectrum below and define the outliers in your own words. What does sturdy mean to you? Then find people, places, and things you love that feel that way, break each one into pieces (color, type, texture, pattern, shape, photography), and figure out which pieces are doing the work.
The only place you can’t look is your own market. Steal from a book character, a place you’ve been, an album you’ve worn out. Eat at a nice restaurant. Watch a movie that makes you cry. Browse book covers at the library or the local used record store. Get sucked into a documentary on space travel and allow yourself to be enamored by the cosmos.
Or sit in a park for ten minutes doing absolutely nothing but listening and observing. You need a new well, so go find it (hint: it’s not at your desk).
An aside: I highly recommend NOT using AI for this.
Then I got hungry
The best example I can give of this method working outside of design is... tacos.
Lebanese immigrants brought shawarma to Mexico, and the generation after them kept the vertical spit and swapped in what was around them on this side of the globe: pork, dried chiles, a corn tortilla, a pineapple on top. Nobody calls it knockoff shawarma. It’s just al pastor.
That kind of collision is why the work we did for Prisma, SaberSim, AudienceTap, and DevStats landed. Every muse came from somewhere that had nothing to do with their market and everything with how those teams wanted people to feel.
DevStats was inspired by aeronautic instruments
AudienceTap was inspired by Albus Dumbledore
Prisma was inspired by a Ratatat album cover
SaberSim was inspired by the Matrix and Nike
Having gone down this rabbit hole of emotions and personal affinities, you’ll have what you need to judge whether something is or isn’t on brand. We haven’t created it yet, but we’ve defined it.
If you want the actual blueprint we walk clients through, reply and I’ll send it over.
— Zach
