What are you willing to not be?
Why simple, professional, and modern fail as brand attributes and what to do instead.
An inevitable dualism bisects nature, so that each thing is a half, and suggests another thing to make it whole.
— Emerson,"Compensation" 1841
Ask a room full of founders how they want their brand to feel and you’ll get the same three words back, almost every time, usually in the same order.
Simple. Professional. Modern.
I’ve heard it in brand strategy workshops for years (seriously, I could set my watch by it). Everyone nods. Somebody writes it on the whiteboard. It feels like progress.
It isn’t.
Let's take a look at what happens if we flip them.
Simple becomes complicated.
Professional becomes untrustworthy.
Modern becomes dated.
Now name the company that wants any of those ascribed to their branding. You can’t. Nobody walks into a kickoff hoping to come out confusing, sketchy, and stuck in 2008. And if nobody would ever choose the opposite, you haven’t made a choice at all.
A real brand attribute has a second pole. It’s something you could decide not to be, and a competitor could happily decide to be instead. Simple, professional, and modern don’t have a flip side anyone wants. They’re table stakes. They get you into the room, but they don’t get you remembered once you’re in it.
1. Simple
Your brand shouldn’t be complicated, in how it works or how it feels. People should understand what you do and get it fast. Agreed. So does everyone else, and that’s the problem.
Reform’s old brand was simple. Clean, clear, easy to follow. And it didn’t do a single distinctive thing with any of it.
Simple is the baseline. It won’t make you stand out. It just keeps you from falling over in a drunken stupor.
2. Professional
This is the one people get wrong in the most interesting way.
Look at Liquid Death. Skulls, heavy metal lettering, canned water that tells you to murder your thirst. On the surface it’s about as unprofessional as a brand can get. Put that deck in front of most boardrooms and somebody asks for something a little more… professional. And yet nobody wonders whether the water inside is safe to drink. They are valued at over $1B and have literally sold Tony Hawk's blood.
Once you notice it, you see it everywhere.
Clay sells data enrichment to sales and growth teams, which is about as B2B as software gets, and the whole brand looks like it was sculpted out of Play-Doh. Nobody hands over their pipeline worried these people aren’t serious or capable.
Playskool and Fisher-Price are primary colors and bubble letters. They also make the things you hand to a toddler who is going to put every. single. piece. in their mouth.
It’s hard to think of a higher bar for trust than that.
Shit, even diaper brands, something we literally put in skin contact with our children is soft, round, pastel, and perceived as cute, and it’s still professional enough to be at the hip with your kid all day.
None of them look professional. All of them are.
That’s because “professional” was never a visual quality. When people say they want to look professional, they mean trustworthy and competent. Trust gets built somewhere else entirely: in the coherence of your design assets and touchpoints, in the copy, the messaging, the accolades, and whether the thing does what it says it does.
It doesn’t come from your logo being a blue sans serif.
Your visuals are free to have an opinion. Being competent is the part you can’t skip.
3. Modern
When someone says modern, they mean “doesn’t look outdated.” Don’t look like a WordPress theme from 2008. Fine. Nobody should.
SaberSim’s previous site is what that fear looks like.
To clarify, looking dated is a different thing from looking timeless, historic, or established, and those are real positions. A brand can choose to look like it’s been around for a hundred years. That’s a direction, modern is just a floor.
Richter Guardian's updated homepage has a nostalgic, historic bent to it with the colors and the typefaces that were selected (inspired by old-timey money). Nothing about it feels outdated.
So what do you ask for instead?
Pairs. Every attribute I use in a brand strategy workshop comes with its opposite attached, and both ends are a perfectly good place for a brand to live.
Masculine or feminine.
Subtle or expressive.
Established or youthful.
Authoritative or nurturing.
Luxury or affordable.
Orderly or chaotic.
Industrial or natural.
Elite or approachable.
Casual or elegant.
Serious or playful.
Sturdy or refined.
These work where simple, professional, and modern don’t because every one of them carries a visual connotation. Those connotations are personal to whoever’s picking, sure, but it’s far easier to suss out what a founder is after when they tell me “sturdy” than when they tell me “professional.” One of those words has a weight and a texture. The other one is entrepreneurial jargon.
And they’re relative. Sturdy doesn’t mean much floating in the abstract. It needs something to be sturdier than.
So when a founder can’t quite get there, I’ll walk into my kitchen mid-workshop and come back with two knives (cue the Hitchcock music).
One is a big, bulky carbon steel cleaver with a chunky wooden handle. The other is a slim, refined santoku made from Damascus steel with a lovely polish. I hold them up to the camera and ask, "which one is more sturdy and which one is more refined?"
Everybody gives the same answer 😏
They’re both great knives. They just feel and look different, intentionally.
Simple, professional, and modern aren’t a brand. They’re the minimum requirements for having a business that is worth paying attention to.
Next time, skip them. Ask what you’re willing to not be, and start there.
— Zach
PS. Having a hard time deciding how those attributes can manifest themselves visually? Book a call. 👇
