The Kynd Way: Why Studio Kynd Is More Than a Branding Studio

Sep 4

When I started Studio Kynd, I thought I was becoming a brand designer. I imagined my work would be centred around creating beautiful identities, choosing typefaces, developing colour palettes, designing websites and finding thoughtful ways to bring someone’s vision to life and, of course, that is still a huge part of what I do, but somewhere along the way I realised that the work happening between the conversations, strategy sessions, moodboards and final designs was about so much more than branding. I was not just working with businesses, I was often meeting women in a season of becoming.

Women starting something for the first time, changing direction after years of doing things one way, building businesses that had outgrown the brands they began with, or finally trusting an idea that had been sitting quietly in the back of their mind for years and more often than not, they weren’t coming to me with everything perfectly figured out. They came with fragments of ideas, screenshots they had saved, pages of notes, things they loved but couldn’t explain why, or simply a feeling that the business they had built no longer felt quite like them.

Over time, I realised that my role wasn’t just to make all of that look beautiful. It was to help them understand what they were really trying to say.

I’m a designer, but I’m so much more than that and the longer I’ve done this work, the more I’ve understood that good branding requires far more than knowing which colours work together or finding the perfect typeface as so much of my work happens before I ever begin designing, it happens in the conversations where we talk about where the business has come from, where it is now and where the person behind it wants to go next, when I ask the question that makes someone stop for a moment, or when I notice the tiny thing they mentioned in passing that somehow ends up becoming the thread that connects the entire brand.

I listen, I question, I guide and I help untangle all of the thoughts that have been living in someone’s head, bringing clarity to ideas that perhaps haven’t had the words around them yet. Sometimes I’m a designer, sometimes I’m a strategist and sometimes I’m simply a sounding board for someone who is trying to work out what the next chapter of their business looks like and sometimes, perhaps most importantly, I hold space because there is often something much bigger happening underneath the decision to build a brand.

Creating a brand gives us an opportunity to look beyond how something appears and ask what it actually means. We begin thinking about who you are now, what you believe in, what you want to be known for, who you want to connect with and, ultimately, where you are trying to go and I don’t believe the answer is always to reinvent everything or become something completely new. Sometimes the most powerful shift is coming back into alignment with what was already there, understanding it more deeply and having the confidence to express it more clearly and perhaps branding isn’t always about transformation, sometimes it is about becoming more of who you already are.

Over the years, without really intending to, I think I have developed my own way of approaching this work. I wouldn’t necessarily call it a formula because I don’t believe brands should be built from formulas. Every founder, every story and every business I work with is different, and I want the process to leave enough space for us to discover something we didn’t necessarily know we were looking for at the beginning but there is a philosophy that runs through everything I do at Studio Kynd, and I’ve started to think of it as The Kynd Way.

Strategy becomes conversation, where we can explore ideas openly rather than trying to force a business into a series of boxes. Design becomes translation, taking everything we have uncovered and turning it into something people can see, feel and understand.

Your positioning, your story, your ambitions, your personality and even those little instinctive things you’re naturally drawn towards begin to come together, and slowly we create a visual world that feels like it could only ever belong to you.

It is considered and strategic, but there is intuition within it too. It is collaborative because I never want to create something for you without creating it with you, and it is personal because I believe the strongest brands have a little bit of the person behind them woven throughout.

That, to me, is The Kynd Way.

Not designing a version of you that simply looks good from the outside, but uncovering what is already there and giving it somewhere to belong.

The Y in Kynd has always stood for you because behind every brand I create is a person with an idea, a story, a point of view and somewhere they want to go next. We talk so much about logos, typography, colour palettes, websites, strategy and positioning when we talk about branding, and of course all of those things matter, but ultimately they are simply tools we use to communicate something much more human…

The person behind it.

The things you care about, the experiences that have shaped you, the reason you started, the way you see your industry differently and the vision you have for what your business could become all find their way into the brand we create together, sometimes in obvious ways and sometimes in tiny details that only you and I will ever fully understand.

That’s why I don’t think your brand really begins with your logo. I think it begins much earlier than that, with you and the thing you feel compelled to put into the world. So, maybe you are reading this because you can feel something beginning to shift and perhaps you’ve evolved, your business has evolved alongside you, and the brand that once fitted perfectly is starting to feel like it belongs to somewhere you’ve already been rather than where you’re going next.

You might not know exactly what that next version looks like yet, and I don’t think you necessarily need to and sometimes that’s where the most interesting work begins. If you ever need someone beside you while you figure out what comes next, I’m always here. 🤍

I WANT TO WORK WITH KYND