The Brand Is the Experience

The design work that wins awards and the design work that actually holds a brand together are, more often than not, two different jobs. One is a slick rebrand or a beautiful one-off campaign. The other is quieter, the work of making sure a brand feels coherent across a hundred small moments that nobody thinks to call "design" at all. That second job rarely gets a spotlight. It's also the one most responsible for whether people trust what you're selling them.

Every brand is one long conversation now

Verna Swehla, head of growth design at Grammarly, has a line about her team's job that we haven't stopped thinking about. "Growth designers are kind of like great dinner party hosts. If core product designers are crafting a thoughtful dish to serve up, growth designers are thinking about the lighting, the playlist, and who's sitting next to who." Her point isn't really about design. It's about ownership. "People perceive their experience with us as one long conversation," she says. "Even if we don't structure our teams that way, we have to design like we do."

That's the tension at the heart of most brand experience work. Customers don't experience your org chart. They experience one continuous relationship with your brand, assembled from touchpoints built by different teams, on different timelines, against different briefs. The seams don't show up in any single team's KPI. They show up in whether the whole thing feels like it was made by one company that knows what it's doing.

Stability and flexibility aren't opposites

Hana Tanimura, a design lead at Google, described designing at scale using an image worth borrowing. "Trees have deep roots that keep them stable and anchored. But when strong winds come, they bend, sway, and flex. That flexibility is what prevents them from breaking." An experience built only for consistency turns brittle the moment context changes. One built only for flexibility never feels like anything at all. The brands that hold up have both right. They're consistent enough that people trust it, and flexible enough that it works across channels, devices, and moments.

That balance is a strategy decision, not a design one. Someone has to decide what stays sacred everywhere the brand shows up and where there's room to flex. Some organizations never make that call explicitly. It just gets made by default, by whichever team happens to own the last touchpoint.

The unglamorous work is the differentiator

None of this is the part of the brand story that makes a highlight reel. It's also, increasingly, the part that decides whether a brand feels credible the tenth time someone encounters it instead of just the first. The work worth doing isn't a bigger creative swing. It's deciding, deliberately, what stays consistent everywhere your brand shows up, and building the discipline across every team to hold that line.

Sources

• Design at scale isn't flashy – but it's the most interesting work in the room, It's Nice That, 25 September 2025