![[ 11 ]- Branding and Design Mistakes to Avoid with Calin Balea - podcast episode cover](https://assets.metacast.app/images/episode/artwork/VIEwslqG)
in order to provide more value, you need to, um, The improve the, And in order to provide more value, you need to, improve the, improve your skills or be able to, yeah, essentially just become better at what you're doing. And you can only do that if you spend the time and investigate the time and effort. and usually the people that are willing to invest that much time and effort are people that are passionate about a certain, topic in this case design. But it applies to everything.
Because if you just wanna do it for the money and you don't enjoy the work, then it's going to be excruciating to dedicate that amount of time to become good at something. And I think I do. I'm not idealistic. I know there's a balance between, being passionate about something and being, doing something that you're good at. If you're good at something, you are more likely to enjoy doing it. If you're frustrated and struggling and not getting results, then it's not an enjoyable experience.
And even if it's something that, or an yeah, an area of interest or something that you enjoy seeing doesn't mean that it'll automatically translate. Trying to better your skills and find that sweet spot between Doing something that you enjoy and doing something that provides value to others and being willing to put in the work. There's no shortcut, no, no hack. At least that I found. Overall, I think that's the key.
Then we can get into specifics like don't know, tactical Decisions or what exactly to do at a certain point in your career. But if that's one piece of advice that I would give it would be that
like that. Yeah. The shortcut in life is to realize there are no shortcuts and stop looking for shortcuts and just do the work. Yeah. I like that. So let's talk about brand identity. For a startup, what are your thoughts on how somebody that's I guess brand identity can go to not only a startup, any type of business or social media, whatever, like the brand specifically. What are your thoughts around maybe what are people doing wrong?
What is the common mistakes and what do you see that people could benefit from your expertise on that?
Brand design is a very wide topic, but if I would have to pick something to point out, I think a lot of startups are struggling to find a happy middle when it comes to brand design. Some of them, ignore it almost altogether thinking that it's a, they need to focus on the product or solving a problem. And brand, brand design and their brand identity is just it's a luxury at that point. And they ignore it.
At the end though, at the other end of the spectrum, there are people that invest too much time in crafting a beautiful brand iden visual brand identity or to a lot of marketing around their brand. And in the detriment of developing a product that people actually want. So For a startup, I think identity is important because that is what sets you apart. And by brand identity, we don't, I'm not referring only to, the visual aspect like their logo or their visual identity.
I'm referring to the perception they Are helping shape in the minds of their customers. Because essentially that's, that, that's what brand identity is is what people think about you not your visual identity. I think, for the most part you need to invest in understanding your customer. On, on one side and on the other side is defining who you want to be. That's where brand identity, I think needs to be. If you're just thinking about who you are and what you wanna express.
Then and not thinking about the customer, then you're not going to design something that's attractive to them. And on the other end, if you are too concerned with what people think about you, and trying to design something that doesn't really state anything or isn't polarizing in any way, then again it is going to be very bland and With brand identity, you want to have character. You want to stand out in a certain way. You want to create a an impression. For example I was listening to a podcast.
It was I'm blanking on the the name at the moment but. It was this marketing pundit that was giving the example of a of a hotel. A lot of hotels are somewhat branded visually. They have a logo, they have a website but they don't really have a brand identity because you don't have any expectations on. What you will, how your experience with that hotel is going to be before you book the hotel. So that's why a lot of people are just sorting by price.
Whenever you are looking for a hotel you set some minimum criteria do you want what type of rumor do you want the dates and so on. Then you sort by price and then you try to find, The lowest price for the quality you want. But if you would have a hotel that is designed, built, and run by Apple or by Nike, then you already can imagine what that hotel will look like how it will run, what types of features or amenities it would have, and so on. If you imagine
the most importantly, the standard of quality across the board, right? Standard
of quality. And in the case of apple, for example, you would imagine a very high tech place, right? Where everything is very user-friendly, very easy to use and so on. Filled with Apple devices, of course. But the overall experience would be high tech would be automated for the most part, and so on. Organized, clean, intuitive, elegant.
Yeah. If on the other hand, if you are checking in at a Nike Run hotel, you expect that to be much more energetic focused on sports, having an amazing gym maybe having a community of people there that are all into working gout and so on. You will have a healthier breakfast filled with, I don't know With nutritious food that, that, that's tailored to your macronutrients or whatever. So you can imagine what you would experience there. You already have some sort of expectations.
that's what branding is. So that's what we
create the expectation visually, but also with the quality of whatever service or product the person gets used to we delivering. Sure. So it gets part of the part of the branding comes from the actual product and service experience.
Exactly. So a lot of people are especially designers, focus on the visual aspect of a brand. But everyone is branding the company from the c e o all the way to people in at Cust doing customer support. They're influencing the People's perception of the brand. So they're essentially doing branding.
That's why they're thought they're they re receive a lot of training into how to talk to people, how to solve issues how to I don't know, deal with tense situations and so on, because The customer's experience reflects on the brand, on, on their reputation. So it's not just what marketing materials you put out and how they are designed. It's everything.
It's your product, it's the team the the culture that you're building as a company also influences the brand because the the company's reputation is, largely influenced by the people working there by the by their values and what they're building. Yeah.
That's perfect. I like that. So let's talk a little bit about what is scope creep and how can we avoid it?
So scope creep is usually it's an unfortunate practice when you are designing something and deciding what features to build. You start off with an idea of what we wanna build, and then you just add more and more to it. So the
Why do you add more to it? why do people add more to it? What, is there a temptation or the idea they have in their head that makes them do this?
I think it comes down to not fully understanding what the customer actually wants or what the user wants. Because if you are certain you understand the problem the user need. And your goal is to solve that need, then it's very easy to distinguish between what's a must have and what's a nice to have.
And scope creep happens when, because for the most part, people don't wanna impose their will and Spend a lot of time and resources on something that's just a nice to have that's just something that can, it would be a good feature, but not critical at that point in time. But when you're not sure what's the right answer, then you start Being tempted to add on more and more features onto a product that may contribute to self solving the problem.
I think that's the simplest definition of scope creep. And how to fix
it called scope creep. Like Wes, what I, can you explain the why the word scope creep?
So you are referring to the scope of a project, what exactly that project is about and creep because more and more ideas creep in and it start expanding the scope of a project. So it's like moving the goalposts all the time or widening them and so on. That's what I think that's the simplest way to explain it. So people
sometimes think that more is better, more feature, and yeah, some, and it's very difficult for, I think, humans in almost every aspect of life to reduce, simplify, that was why Apple, the Steve Job era was so amazing. Everything, nothing Too many buttons, confusing people, too many things that don't even work well. 'cause there's so many that they're not focused on making something really good.
Exactly. And people have good intentions when they're doing this. They want to solve the problem, but they're not fully understanding what the user needs. And it's not easy. I'm not blaming people. I know how hard it is to Figure out what exactly the right solution is because, it takes a lot of effort to do the research.
And it's also, it's both a science and an art form in a sense because people will try to explain what the what their problems are and what they think the solution the ideal solution is. But People are not experts in solutions. They're experts in their problem. You can interview them and do user research through different methods to try to understand the problem.
But even there, it's not so easy to identify because, This is a, again a wide topic, but people, have a hard time expressing exactly their, what their problem is. Sometimes they give you the answer that they think you want to hear and so on. So it's definitely not easy to identify the problem and what the solution needs to be. But. In order to avoid scope, creep and wasting resources, it's something that you need to do.
Got it. Got it. So let's talk about design. I see I like design. I'm not a designer. I didn't study, but I've always had a, I've always liked design and I've always had a feeling for what's good design, bad design, and I see a lot of bad design. It seems to be something difficult to come across a truly good design in any, in anything, whether it be like a visual thing or a product. Talk to about, talk to us about, what are the common design mistakes you've seen people make entrepreneurs? Yeah.
I think it ties in with what we were talking about earlier, in the sense that, a lot of startups are making this mistake thinking that they need a ton of features for something to work or it needs a ton of features. To be able to be for that product to be successful. And that is rarely the case.
It depends what you're developing, but for the most part, when you are when you are building a product, if you know your customer, You can find that m v p, that minimum viable product, that product, that requires a minimum amount of effort to build, to develop and that will solve the customer's problem. Maybe not entirely but if you're addressing a real need, then even a partial solution to a problem is going to be successful.
Even if you are solving a problem halfway, if that problem is real, then people are going to use that solution. Now, it's not as easy in real life as it may sound because you have competitors. You have Some problems cannot. If they're not solved completely, they're not solved at all. So we would need to talk specifics about a product or a service. But I think that's a tendency a lot of founding teams have is to add more and more features because they think they're.
They're good ideas or they're cool, but it's not, they turn up, turn out to be just fluff that users, can do without, or that might even get in the way of what users actually wanna do with your product. I think that's a common mistake.
Yeah. It's maybe also, maybe people wanna. they feel, oh, I had this great idea and they're in love with the idea. And how that makes some people, I think, feel get in love with the idea and how that idea reflects on their quote unquote, brilliance. And they gotta get self-absorbed and try to implement this idea into something else.
And then by doing that, they basically mess up something that was already working just 'cause of the ego of Sometimes they, I think people get too attached to ideas and what do you think about that?
Yeah I think that happens sometimes with founders, especially if they raised a lot of money and have done a lot of marketing around their startup before they reached product market fit. So they maybe insist on developing a product or some sort of feature and they tie their reputation or their brilliance to that idea. It might happen and it's very rarely turns out Positive. It rarely works out.
Another thing that I see happen more often, especially with founding teams and non-technical founders, is that they experience an issue. Let's say they are in a different line of work. They experience an issue. Then they go out and try to launch a startup to solve that issue. And because they experienced that problem, they think they know exactly what the solution needs to be because they felt it. They know the pain and they think they know exactly what the solution needs to be.
And it's very rarely the case. It's usually not as simple because there are multiple perspectives that you need to take into account. Sure. Starting there is is better than just picking a problem at random and trying to solve it because you already Have a better understanding of the problem than someone that's that just comes in and says, okay, I want to do this or that feature, or to develop that product.
But it's usually not as simple because if you are solving a big enough problem, Then you, your perspective, you're just you need to, as a founder, you need to remind yourself that you're a data point of one. And you never take real decisions with a data point of one. You need, you need to do more research and get a, like a 360 understanding of a problem. You're just one, one point in those 360 degrees.
So doing doing research and talking to other people that have the same problem, then you can then get a better picture of what you need to build. But it's very enticing. It's very tempting to believe that you just need to hire a development team to materialize that idea that you have in your head. And it's usually not that simple.
So we basically overestimate our own brilliance, and then we underestimate the complexity of any situation. we think like the model that we made in our mind, that's how it's gonna play out in real life. And then when it's actually implemented, we realize that it was so much more complex. I didn't realize all these different things could have happened and actually the whole thing could have been done this other way.
And so it's basically having a humbleness and an awareness of our own limitations. No, ma, no matter how brilliant you are. even Steve Jobs has like hundreds of people in his design teams and his Products that was all constantly, talking and giving him ideas and letting the best idea win and having that approach to it, right?
Yeah, exactly. I was listening to an interview with Johnny. Ive the ex chief of design at Apple who worked a lot with Steve and He would, he was telling a story that they usually had, they had regular meetings and Steve would sometimes come up with ideas that would just take the air out of the room that there would be their brilliant ideas. And they, there are, there were ideas that were changing the company. And sometimes they were complete flops. That even to someone that.
Had so much experience and I was so brilliant at what they're, they were doing. Even they had really like completely ridiculously bad ideas. Yeah. And they had this safety net in place of people, of advisors that were there to help catch those and not let them damage the company. So yeah being humble is I think an essential trait for a founder and also being able to empathize with your customers to put yourself in their shoes.
If you are let's say, if you wanna solve a problem for childcare, let's say, and you are a father and you have a wife and a couple of kids, you might imagine that you, your idea of how that problem can be solved might. You need to realize that might look very different from, I don't know a single mother raising a child on her own and maybe in in a neighborhood that is not as affluent as the one you're living in. Or, and working two jobs and not having anyone to help her with her chores.
So being able to empathize with different people will help you craft a better solution that is going to help more people than yourself. So if you wanna say, if you want to develop something that will be bought by thousands of people, you need to take their their opinion into account. If you're just listening to yourself, then you're going to build a product that you alone will want to buy. And then you don't have a
business. Yeah. To basically put yourself to. Like that, as that quote from Michael Corone and the godfather that he said to try to put yourself and the other person and try to see the world from their eyes, not, your own perspective, how would, like you said, a mother living in this situation, how would she stink and perceive this? Because it's gonna be obviously different than you if you are not that.
Yeah, and it's not it's not about all just about imagining what this, that situation is like. But empathy helps you realize that you don't understand it, you, that you don't know how it feels or what the what such a person is struggling with. And then go out and talk to such people and understand their perspective and then working that into your product or service.
Yeah, I like that even better than imagining it, actually realizing that you can't imagine it, and then actually going and talking to those people to see the real. The reality, right? Because we make some really bad assumptions a lot of the times. Exactly. Yeah. I like that. And also being humble to pivot, right? Like Steve Jobs and his iPod shuffle.
I think it was the third generation where they took all, all out, they took all out, all the buttons, and it was a huge disaster because it was like the headphones, like it was a terrible idea. The next time they bring the buttons back, Yeah. And they say, you know what? We made a mistake, but it's much better to accept it, because he was obsessed with what's the best product. So if you realize it wasn't let's change. It doesn't, it is not tied into his ego. I'm so brilliant.
They came up with this device with no buttons. It turns out it's the stupidest idea that they've ever made. They admitted it, changed it. And so it's like that humbleness and obsession with creating that best product, no matter if the most brilliant idea that you thought actually was completely stupid doesn't matter because that's not the point, right? This is not an art show that you're gonna show to the world how smart you are, right?
Yeah. That's the difference between art and design. Design needs to solve a problem. Art can live on its own and not solve a problem, and actually it shouldn't. And it's subjective. But design is much more practical. It has some sort of intersection with the art world in the sense that good design is also aesthetic, but it shows it should solve a problem unlike a piece
of art. I like that. I like that. All right, Manu. Colin, it's been so nice talking to you, man. I wish Likewise. It was very enlightening. And so tell us, about your business, your services, where people can find you.
Sure. My website, my studio website is Contrast Studio. And I'm also on LinkedIn, so if people Google or search my name or the name of the studio, you will find it. That's where I'm mostly active currently on between all the social networks. If you want any any advice or if I can help anyone with any sort of design work you can reach out to me there and I would be happy to help.
That's very kind of you. So kalan for those that might, I don't know, are just listening. It's gonna be, everything's gonna be in the show notes, but Kalan is spelled c a. l i n and your last name is spelled B. It's Alia, it's, yeah, B as in burrito, a l e a. So yeah, you can put that in link, but
it's easier if you contrast studio is easier to remember. You ju you can just search that on LinkedIn or Google it and you'll find it.
Perfect. Alright man, it was nice meeting you. Thank you so much for being here and we'll keep in touch. Yeah, thank you. It was a pleasure.