how two designers in atlit ended up compressing branding into five days — the story behind the first half of the talk.
every brand starts the same way. someone has an idea they can't stop thinking about. they turn it over in the shower, in the car, at 2am. it's good. maybe it's great.
then it meets the world, and the world doesn't care.
the idea was never the hard part. being seen is. that's the whole reason we're standing here.
married. two designers who never learned how to work apart. three girls. one house in atlit with the sea at the bottom of the street.
i'm the technological one, inbal is the aestheticist. but we're after the same two things, always: beauty and practicality.
monday to thursday. brands and products. and yes — we literally run.
an email, 2015. she was inbaloza. i was a guy who wrote code and made posters. we said let's do one project together and then never stopped.
for a few years we were a one-stop shop for all things design — branding, product design, and some other crazy projects i still don't want to talk about. a small studio, a multidisciplinary team scattered across the world, and clients who handed two people everything they had.
what follows is a decade laid flat. every one of these was somebody's whole life at the time.
inbal grew up looking. at light on a building, at pattern in a hillside, at the shape of a page before you read a single word on it.
in 2013 she was in the paper under a headline that read: designing the future. she hadn't planned any of it. she just kept making things beautiful until people started paying her to.
she creates brands. that's the whole sentence.
i've always wanted to be a better designer. i thought programming would make me one. then illustration. then marketing. then meditation. anything, whatever, from every direction at once.
an idealist with a pragmatist bolted on. exhausting way to live. very good way to build things.
here's what i actually believe. everything is designed. bad design, good design, remarkable design — and no design, which is also design, just done by accident.
design isn't decoration. design is a creative process. “creativity is the act of discovery,” said george lois. michelangelo said the statue was already inside the stone and the sculptor's only job was to find it. same claim, five hundred years apart.
so what am i hunting for? simple. immediate connection. flexible enough to keep giving. limitless. open. a system, never a poster.
and underneath all of it: i want to make things that make things. tools, methodologies, frameworks. a monkey picks up a bone and becomes a person. give someone the right tool and you haven't helped them once — you've changed what they're capable of.
meta-creativity. empower creativity. that's the ambition.
not from design.
bark. a wildflower field. a stone on wet asphalt. piano keys. leonardo. a nebula that has been exploding for a million years and doesn't know we're watching.
everything good i've ever made started somewhere that had nothing to do with the brief.
rams. teenage engineering. sagmeister. pentagram. the people who made one decision and then had the nerve to hold it.
look at their work long enough and you notice the same thing every time. they're not more talented than everyone else. they're just less willing to compromise.
every tool i've built came out of being annoyed. a plugin because sketch couldn't handle states. then a design-code tool of my own, which dragged me sideways into the business side and taught me the hard way how much of design is strategy.
i learned to meditate. i learned to play. i read every startup book with a loud cover on it.
business and design turned out to be the same subject wearing two outfits.
inbal was pregnant. two girls already at home.
the bank account was red, then negative.
then a global pandemic.
we couldn't take it any longer.
inbal said: i saw this book you're reading, something about design… sprint? why aren't we doing the same thing for branding? the best brand projects we ever had went fast. a week. one great client, one great story, and i owned it start to finish.
my first answer was no. branding is emotional. it's a deep process. it needs time to breathe. you can't rush a brand.
and as the words were leaving my mouth, i heard them. i was lying. everyone in this industry is lying about this. the months aren't for the brand — they're for the meetings, the rounds, the waiting, the invoice.
design thinking in five days. hyper-efficiency. branding under a microscope. paul graham: make a small number of people very very very happy. so we picked a narrow group and served them absurdly well.
since then, we run brand sprints. five plus years. a hundred plus of them.