Why Unexpected References Make Better Branding
When people think about branding research, they often imagine mood boards filled with logos, colour palettes and typography.
The earliest stages of a branding project are less about aesthetics and more about finding an idea worth expressing. That's why some of the most valuable references I use don't come from branding at all.
For a recent project connecting international charities and NGOs, I found myself looking at two seemingly unrelated pieces of work: Paul Baran's distributed network diagrams and Charles and Ray Eames' Powers of Ten.
Neither was created to inspire brand identities. Yet both fundamentally changed how I thought about the project. Baran's diagrams were created in the 1960s to explain how communication networks could remain resilient if parts of them failed. The Eameses' film is a journey through scale, travelling from a picnic in a Chicago park to the edge of the observable universe before reversing direction into the microscopic world.
One is a technical diagram. The other is a short film. Yet they both achieve something remarkably similar. They make invisible ideas visible.
Looking beyond the obvious
It's easy to collect references that look similar to the outcome you want. Often doing competitor research or knowing what trends are working in the market.
The problem is that visual references often encourage visual solutions. Before long, every mood board begins to resemble every other mood board. Unexpected references work differently. They help define the thinking before the aesthetics. A scientific diagram might reveal a new organisational model. A documentary could suggest a narrative structure. An architectural drawing might influence hierarchy, rhythm or composition.
The goal isn't to borrow the style. It's to borrow the way the work thinks.
Power of Ten. Perspective, not just scale
When I first revisited Powers of Ten, I thought it was simply a film about scale. The more I watched it, the more I realised it's really about perspective.
There are no elaborate effects or unnecessary distractions, just a single idea executed with remarkable clarity. By continuously changing the viewer's point of view, the film reveals relationships that would otherwise remain invisible. Looking back, the project wasn't influenced by the appearance of these references.
It was influenced by the principles behind them.
My biggest takeaways were:
Great design reveals relationships, not just objects.
Context matters as much as detail.
Constraints often lead to the clearest and most memorable ideas.
Every design decision exists within a larger system.
Those ideas shaped everything that followed—from the strategy to the visual identity.
Paul Baran. Reality of Relationships.
Around the same time, I found myself looking again at Paul Baran's network diagrams. They're equally understated:
Three circles.
Three ways of connecting them.
One centralised.
One decentralised.
One distributed.
