Love, What Even Is That? — Just Oil My Joints, Buddy (2)
"Let's start with the naming drafts."
You need a name before you can make a logo. That was the rule, and this time, too, we had each agreed to bring in a few options.
The heart those cold machines don't have—that has to be something warm. Something lyrical.
In most branding, the one strategy you cannot skip is differentiation. Market research exists for the same reason: to lock down a difference, and to deliver a value no competitor has, one that is ours alone.
So we go warm and lyrical. I started with warm words, and with words bound to the heart and to feeling, and made a list.
Tie these to the client's species traits, and the association will come on its own. Next I went hunting for words that belonged to robots and computers.
Weave the two kinds together. Make them one word. Coin something new that way, and you'd have a proper noun that existed nowhere else. I braided Heart in with Hardware and Software, and a word came out of it: Heartware. Hardware, software, and the third substance that made a robot—Heartware.
This is going smoothly. For all my fretting over such an abstract product, the work was rolling right along. Good. A few more naming drafts in exactly this vein.
"These are the naming drafts we'll take into the client meeting."
Pascal gathered the names the team had brought and set them in a single order.
Heartware
Warmchip
Soulbit
Another team meeting in the conference room. A lot of what I brought actually got picked. Heartware and Warmchip—two of them were mine. The last, Soulbit, belonged to Seo Gwan-yul. The sound of it wasn't exactly refined, but they seemed to have rated the meaning for how fast it landed.
Hena's drafts didn't make the cut this time. That's a shame. She was an optimistic sort, and she put the team ahead of her own ambition, so I doubted she would mind much. I stole a look at her face, careful not to be caught at it. Yes—bright, the way she always was.
...Or not. Her brows looked a little fallen.
What a pity. Her naming drafts last time were genuinely good. Even a capable designer was bound to swing a little, now and then. You're good, Hena. Next time, you'll get your moment. I closed the meeting with a small, private cheer for our jellyfish.
A bolt out of the clear blue, hurled at us just as we walked into that client meeting bursting with confidence. Logo drafts too—and several of them, all at once?
Th... that could happen. Sure. At a human agency, turning out multiple drafts was ordinary life, even when it pointlessly swelled the staff's workload. Pouring time and people into options you already knew would be thrown out was inefficient, which was why the effective move was to settle things with the client early and narrow the scope.
But if our client-on-high says so, what am I supposed to do?
So after we got back to the company, the team met and split the work.
"For now, build the logos off your own naming drafts. Lee-hyun, you take Heartware. Gwan-yul, you're on Soulbit. ...Hena, you do the Warmchip logo."
Pascal dealt out one logo apiece. We would each do the work, then compile it together and carry it into the next client meeting.
Mm. It's Heartware, so what if I fuse a heart shape with the feel of a circuit diagram? I scratched out a sketch that simplified a circuit-board graphic down into a heart's silhouette. But not too complicated. Clean. I decided to try for an intuitive symbol.
The client knocked our logo drafts back as well.
R... right. What we had brought might simply not have been the direction they wanted. But if they had a direction, how much kinder it would have been to say so from the start. The design brief had gone and written it out, plain as a lie: a request for proactive proposals from the agency.
Once again the team trudged back to the agency, and the meeting that followed was nearly a copy of the last. Deja vu.
"...You all heard the client's feedback. Develop your drafts into a more detailed style, the way they said."
"Ugh~, this is no fun at all~. And if a logo's gonna live in a digital environment, it's gotta be simple."
Seo Gwan-yul said it sunny as ever, and Pascal gave him no answer. Maybe, this once, he agreed.
Yeah. Our Terminator of a client's world was a place where the digital environment had raced on ahead, and the design brief even listed deliverables like digital banners. Drop a logo into media like that and it still has to read at a tiny size. In other words, intuitive. Simple.
Bad feeling. Follow the direction they want, and is a good draft even going to come out of this? But our job was to custom-build the product to the client's order. There was no right to refuse. They want it... so what am I gonna do.
So I made the logo more detailed. Explanatory, this time: a heart stuck onto a robot-shaped silhouette, and a download icon piled on top of that. Doesn't look all that good. I wasn't happy about it. We compiled the drafts anyway, and took them in.
......
Hey, you walking scrap heap!!!!
I knew it. I knew this was coming!!!!!
You could tell at a glance it was wrong. Some clients can't rest until they've tasted whether a thing is shit or soybean paste. You're a machine. A robot. So what—you can't predict the outcome with your programming? You mean you couldn't have known before we built it, huh??!!
Ha...
Even so, if it had ended at rolling back to the earlier drafts, that would have been the merciful version. Our oh-so-great and glorious client ladled on another helping.
"......"
"......"
The whole room went solemn.
...Know when to quit!
And so, yet again, a team meeting opened in the agency conference room.
"...This time, let's bring the naming and the logo drafts in together and look at the whole set."
You could see the wear in their faces, mental and physical both. Yeah. Everyone was taking a beating. I don't have a single idea left...
Back at my desk I barely juiced out a few variations. Anything new had run dry, so they came out a little samey, and these didn't look good either. Ha. Still, we've got to fill the count.
I scraped something together and carried it into the meeting. Everyone else seemed to be in about my state; the drafts looked painfully wrung out. Wait—no. Not all of them. Hena had brought fifteen...!
This isn't Hena's style. Seo Gwan-yul is the divergent type. He throws out a heap of ideas on the chance that one of them lucks into working, and even he was too worn down to bring in very many. But Hena was never that kind of worker to begin with. The jellyfish liked to take a clean three or four drafts and raise their density—fewer of them, and sturdier for it. She isn't pushing too hard, is she...
Still, because Hena had put her back into it, we could fill the five drafts the client had wanted. ...Feels like every design this thing can possibly produce has already come out.
Please, now, just—! Just approve something. Just—!
But.
AAAAAAARGH!!!!!!!
The client's reaction was as hopeless as ever. From here, what else do you want us to do, you tin can!!!!Oh, you love your efficiency—so which round of wildly inefficient revisions is this!!!!!
I genuinely wanted to haul him off to a hardware store and sell him. At the start I had pictured that robot client malfunctioning and getting himself killed. Now I was worried whether I could hold out without smashing the tin can myself.
...Hold on.
Turning his last words back over, something in them didn't sit clean. There's no draft you like? I tamped down the rage boiling in me and asked about the part that snagged.
"I have a question. By any chance, do you currently have that 'heart' installed?"
Hey!!! Are you kidding me!!!!!!!
You built it, and then you won't even use it yourselves—what are we supposed to do with that!!!!!!!
The officials are the ones sitting here like this, and you think the citizens are going to install it? As if!! Huh????!!!!
Right. Design is a subjective realm, up to a point. When a draft gets chosen, the client's preferences and tastes have their say; that is why the client is meant to build the drafts along with you. But that personality-void heap of scrap judged function and nothing else. With nothing you could call a heart—the thing that lets you like something for no clear reason—they simply could not choose.
The team dragged back to the office without a scrap of strength left and dropped into our chairs. The same old repertoire.
Aack! The company has a special ability, so why not just write it out and hand the thing around?!
But we had been told that mentioning an agency ability like that to the outside was taboo. Walk Shut up and install Heart up to a robot as a branding draft, one who knew none of the story behind it, and they really would pop out a machine-gun hand. Yup.
A heart run ragged by artificial intelligence—maybe artificial intelligence could settle it. I slipped into the familiar messenger window.
Comforted by that digital colleague, light of the office and salt of the earth, the clog in my chest blew clear. Ha. Nothing freshens a mood like my own little bamboo grove, the one place the venting actually lands...
...Only for a moment.
A voice came drifting in from somewhere far off. Heard from the design team's seats, the timbre did not belong.
Blair Bardo, the vampire CEO, had come down to our desks.
"......"
And at that bad feeling, my chest went tight all over again.