I spent two months designing a brand instead of making anything

On what polish used to prove, and what it proves now.

For about two months I had a folder on my desktop that was slowly turning into a religion.

There were 3D renders in it. Colour palettes with names. A brand guidelines document that had opinions about spacing. A business plan for a channel that didn’t exist, aimed at an audience I’d never spoken to, with a positioning statement I would have been embarrassed to read out loud. The plan was to build something professional and high end and responsible, and I was going to get every part of it right before anyone saw a single second of it.

Then one night I opened the folder, looked at all of it at once, and understood that none of it mattered.

Which was humiliating in a very specific way, because the thing I wanted to talk about was people hiding behind polish. I had spent two months constructing the exact trap I was planning to warn everyone about, and I had enjoyed every minute of it.

Polish used to be evidence

It’s worth being precise about what actually changed, because the usual version of this argument is just an aesthetic preference dressed up as a principle.

Polish used to carry information. If something looked good, someone had spent time on it. A clean deck meant a person sat down and made a hundred small choices about hierarchy and emphasis. A well shot video meant somebody cared enough to light it, which meant they cared enough to think about what they were saying. The finish was expensive, and because it was expensive it functioned as a costly signal. It told you something true about the effort underneath it, and by extension something true about the person.

That relationship has broken. I can generate a beautiful render in ninety seconds. So can you. So can anyone with a browser and a few dollars a month. The surface has been decoupled from the effort, which means it no longer carries the information it used to carry, and yet all of us keep reading it as though it does.

You can watch this happening in real time. A LinkedIn post with perfect structure and three clean parallel sentences used to suggest someone had thought carefully. Now it suggests nothing at all. A pitch deck with immaculate typography used to be a proxy for rigour. Now it’s a proxy for having a subscription.

What survives is the stuff that stayed expensive. A person saying something they believe. An experience they had, described in enough specific detail that it couldn’t have been generated. The parts they haven’t figured out yet, said out loud with the uncertainty still attached, because uncertainty is the one thing nobody performs when they’re trying to look competent.

The thing I was really doing

I want to be careful here, because “polish doesn’t matter” is a convenient position for someone with no lighting setup.

Craft matters. Editing matters enormously. Being clear is close to the whole job. The distinction I keep coming back to is whether the craft is in service of an idea or standing in place of one, and those two things feel almost identical from the inside. That’s what makes it dangerous.

Two months of colour palettes was the second kind. Every hour of it felt like progress, because it was visible and measurable and it produced artefacts I could look at. I could open the folder and see that I had been working. What I was avoiding was the only part that carried any risk, which was putting my face somewhere public and being wrong where people could see it.

There’s a general shape to this that I notice in a lot of work, not just mine. When the real task is frightening, we find an adjacent task that is legitimately useful, and we do that one instead, and we do it beautifully. The preparation becomes the performance. Nobody can accuse you of laziness, because you genuinely worked hard. You just worked hard at the wrong end of the problem.

The tell is usually that the work has no audience. My brand guidelines had no audience. There was no one to be consistent for.

Where I’ve landed, provisionally

I don’t think the answer is to abandon craft and post something deliberately rough, because performed roughness is just polish wearing different clothes, and people can smell it. There’s a whole genre of studied authenticity now that costs more to produce than the slick version it’s imitating.

What I’ve settled on instead is a sequencing rule. Make the thing, then improve how it looks. Not the other way round. If the idea can’t survive being seen in a plain form, more finish won’t rescue it, it’ll just delay the moment you find out.

So I’m starting without any of it. No palette, no guidelines, no plan for what this becomes.

I’ve made a lot of mistakes across my career and I’d rather they were useful to someone than just embarrassing to me. That’s the whole intention. There was no launch.