How I Run an Easy, 3-Step Brand Discovery Session

Illustration of me, holding my fingers as three

The part of the process most designers skip, and why it changes everything that comes after.

The best design work I've ever produced started the same way: with a conversation.

A conversation about who you are, who your customer is, and what you're actually trying to build. The more I understand your brand, the more obsessed I become with it, and that obsession is what produces work worth paying for.

A discovery session is where that starts. It's a structured meeting where we unpack everything about your company, your customers, and how your brand should speak to them. I wrote about why this step matters, with the help of some giraffes, here.

Here's exactly how it works.

Step 1: The Brief

A brand brief is the north star of every design decision. The document that captures your strategic foundation before anyone talks about colors. It's not a mood board and it's not a creative direction deck. It's the answers to the questions that everything else should be built around. Think of it as a “my brand for dummies” doc.

If you come in with one already, great — we'll build on it together. If you don't have one yet, we'll create a working version in the session. Want to get a head start? Here's how to build your own.

Step 2: The Audit

Before we design anything, we need to know what's already there, and what might be working against you.

An audit reviews your existing brand or product through a specific lens: UX, product design, or brand identity, depending on what we're working on. I've built a free interactive version that covers 30 checkpoints across 6 areas and takes about 10 minutes to complete. It'll tell you exactly where the gaps are before we even get on a call. Get your free brand audit here.

Step 3: Interviews and Workshops

This is the heart of it. I'll interview you (and any key stakeholders) until we have clear, honest answers to four questions:

1. What type of company or product is this?
The answer shapes everything downstream. An app has different design needs than a clothing brand. A B2B SaaS has different touchpoints than a wellness studio. Understanding the category means I'm not designing in a vacuum.

2. Who is your primary user?
Not a demographic profile, a real person. Their habits, their frustrations, what they respond to visually, what would make them immediately trust you. Example: someone who loves the outdoors and fishes on weekends is going to respond to very different design choices than a startup CEO looking for someone to build their brand. Both are valid. Neither is interchangeable.

3. What does your company do in one sentence?
This one sounds easy. It rarely is. We'll work on it together until it's sharp enough to use anywhere: your website, your pitch deck, a conversation at a networking event. Example of mine: "I design brands and products for businesses that their customers can't ignore."

4. What emotion do you want your customers to feel?
This answer drives the visuals, from the colors, the typography, to the imagery, all of it. Example of mine: trust. Every design decision I make for my own brand asks: does this build trust? Yours should have a question like that too.

After the session

Once we've been through all three steps, I go to work. Market research, customer analysis, competitive positioning — the strategic layer that gives the design work something real to stand on. A few days later we meet again to walk through the findings together.

From there, I present design directions. That's when the visual work begins — and by that point, every decision is backed by something more than a preference. It's backed by research, strategy, and a genuine understanding of who your brand is for.

That's the process, and it will help avoid guessing, and designing in the dark.