It’s the 30th issue of Brand Eye, and to mark the occasion we’ve gone and built you something.
First of all, thank you all so much for reading, and thank you even more for subscribing, commenting and engaging in any other way with our work. It’s extremely gratifying to know there’s such a passion for the writing we put out every week. We’ve got all sorts of cool things in the pipeline as we come up on a year of Brand Eye, so stay tuned as we launch the next phase of the newsletter: more of the strategy and theory you’ve come to expect, more content, and new ways to make yourself part of the discussion!
Now, with that said, here it is.
My talented team at Blink Twice, as part of the website redesign, have built something we call the:
👉 Brand Eye Cabinet of Curiosities.
What’s the Brand Eye Cabinet of Curiosities, you ask? Simply put, it’s a visual aid to explore our now fairly substantial library of articles!
If you’re a creative, brand strategist or founder, you know how important mood boards, reference libraries and catalogues of taste of all forms are to the work. But parsing large volumes of dense text is time-consuming.
The Cabinet takes each and every physical product, advert or brand object we’ve ever mentioned in our posts and places them in a scrollable, explorable grid, with each item linked to the issue and section in which we discussed it. You’ll find a pair of Crocs x MSCHF on the same grid as a Fortnum & Mason hamper.
This is basically just a UI layer on top of our Substack to let you explore a blog in the same sort of way you might explore Pinterest or Are.na.
We’ve been thinking a lot about how LLMs and new software are starting to question the way we’ve used the web since the 90s. The Cabinet is our creative play on that, a different way to dig through a blog than the usual list of old posts.
Brand Eye Hall of Fame
While we’re looking back, we also wanted to round up some of our favourite posts so far.
We know many of you are newer subscribers who weren’t here from the beginning, so you might not have had time to go through the archive, but trust us, there are some certified bangers in there. Here are our favourites, for your enjoyment.
01
We know a lot of you signed up after our Paul Rand post on his rules for brand building. If that’s your bag, you definitely need to check out our piece on another of the 20th century’s giants of advertising, George Lois. Learn from the best, they say. This is the best.
02
One of our personal fascinations is Diptyque, who blend French bohemian playfulness with modern self-care to build a brand world you can get lost in, from the oval label to the city candles. But how exactly did they do that? Where does their brand identity come from, and why does it feel so distinct?
03
And last but not least, to tie in with the launch of the Cabinet, and to show off the work my team did creating real physical trading cards of the subjects in the article (very meta I know) here is our piece on the difference between merch and artefacts.
And as you go back through these and everything else we’ve written, please do like them to feed the algorithm. Even more importantly, leave your comments, your feedback, your criticisms. We want Brand Eye to be a place where insightful, passionate people who care about branding argue it out, and we’ll be in the comments arguing back.
Get stuck in, and thanks again for being part of the first 30.
Jack