The New Building a Second Brain: Brand Reveal

When I started my professional career, I had only the most vague sense of how visual aesthetics related to business.

I knew there were brands that I was inherently attracted to, such as Apple. And I had a fairly good sense for what was beautiful, from a childhood spent in museums and art galleries with my artist father. But no one would have accused me of having good taste.

I had the good fortune of landing at a small, boutique consulting firm in San Francisco, which employed a couple skilled designers. I watched from the sidelines as they redesigned our company branding from scratch. The firm also operated a coworking and event space downtown, and I would often stay late at the office to help manage the events we hosted.

The meetups and workshops related to design always caught my attention. I was introduced to a fantastical world of deep patterns and subtle touches and visual “systems” designed to evoke very specific kinds of experiences in the minds of customers. 

I began to see that design was a kind of subterranean layer of reality, communicating in pre-verbal ways to subconscious parts of our brains that are not completely logical. I saw that great design differentiated the best ideas, products, and companies. And that you could intentionally pursue and invest in good design as a strategic asset that was difficult for others to copy.

My father, who once attended fashion school before switching to painting, always told us that “Fashion is what you say about yourself before you open your mouth.” I can’t say I took that advice when it came to my own wardrobe choices. But when applied to companies, I realized that a brand is what a company says about itself before it’s said anything. In a world where we are skeptical of everything, design is an expensive signal that’s hard to completely fake. 

When I started Building a Second Brain, I knew I wanted it to be visually distinctive from the very beginning. I wanted to distance myself as much as possible from the scammy world of online marketing from which most courses come, which is fixated on “conversions” at the expense of anything beautiful, elegant, or timeless.

From my experience working alongside professional designers, I also knew that design is incredibly expensive. Not just in terms of money, but also time, attention, caring, and feedback. I couldn’t afford to make that investment in the beginning, so I turned to pre-made templates for slides and logos found on websites like Creative Market. 

And I bided my time until I could afford to create a brand that I was proud to stake my reputation on.

In January, it will be 5 years since the first cohort of the Building a Second Brain course. Somehow, we’ve delivered 13 cohorts to more than 5,000 graduates from more than 100 countries. It has all gone so much further than anything I ever expected. 

And yet I have this feeling once again of standing on a precipice of something much bigger. In August 2022, the Building a Second Brain book comes out, to be published in multiple countries by the world’s most respected publishing houses. The number of people who have easy access to these ideas will increase by an order of magnitude or more, and we will see if creating a Second Brain is something that appeals beyond our tiny niche.

Early this year as I made progress on the manuscript, I decided it was finally time for us to create a brand that would resonate beyond our existing community. I knew that our roots in the software and technology industry that had carried us so far would soon become a hindrance, limiting the reach of our message. I felt it was time to zoom out from the implementation details and craft a visual message that could transcend any particular software, industry, or time period.

I hired a world-class designer named Maya P. Lim, and we got to work. We closely examined the current branding to pick out what worked, and what didn’t. We studied existing brands in traditional education, self-help, and online learning to identify what set BASB apart. We pored through the feedback surveys from the last few cohorts of the course, looking for common patterns.

Our goal became to double down on the most unique and powerful elements of our existing culture, discard or deemphasize the parts that no longer worked, and paint a visual picture of a future where everyone has the opportunity to acquire the skills that we teach.

Looking at the current logo, which I had designed for about $150 on 99Designs, there were a number of significant issues that we wanted to address:

• The software look and feel appealed strongly to techies and infovores who eagerly try out new products, but we wanted to broaden its appeal in preparation for the book release.
• The current logo felt friendly and approachable, but didn’t convey the premium experience we deliver or a sense of authority in the emerging PKM space.
• It was filtering out people who rely on a strong sense of credibility before trying new things, who don’t have the time or inclination to consume a lot of content before making a commitment.