The Brand

Dan has referred me on to one of his offsiders who in his spare time does brand, graphic design stuff for a good price. I made contact with him through e-mails and he sent me links to previous work and a pitch for doing my work. Compared with what I've just outlayed for the web development deposit, it seemed like loose change so I signed him up. he also works closely with Dan's company so the whole issue of how to get the design onto the website would be easy and seamless - that was one thing that stressed me - how to get Person A talking to Person B so it didn't have to come through me and get badly lost in the extremely poor translation.
So being a person who loves branding and clever brand strategy stuff, I prepared a brief for Arthur the brand guy. As a charity based business I talked about emotional connection, strong emotive imagery, positive not pity, clean, professional, credible. I was in home turf and it felt great. But how easy is it to find examples of brands you connect with - it's like a completely blank page - do I browse randomly or have I failed because I can't find any examples of the look and feel I'm after? So ultimately I thought, "I'll leave it to Arthur since that's his patch".
I rang him up to make sure he'd got my e-mail. I know I shouldn't judge, but having never actually spoken to him, for a moment I thought I was speaking to my 14 year old nephew.He sounded very young and when he said ring me at home later, I wondered if he meant after school. All thoughts of developing an iconic, memorable brand disappeared, as did the notion that I'd be able to leave it in his hands. I may be suprised by him yet, but I'm slowly rolling my brand sleeves up and am preparing to get dirty.