The Answer Is Inside the Box
Most people think branding begins with colours, logos, and moodboards. But it begins much earlier, with what turns out to be a super uncomfortable question: what do you exactly do and why should anyone care?
While working on Simpliwise’s identity as Creative Director at Sane Difference, the identity began with conversations around exhaustion, friction, stalled growth, misaligned teams, and the strange way modern work has become convoluted despite best intentions.
Simpliwise exists to make work WORK by redesigning structures, workflows, behaviours, and systems so people can actually function better together while feeling fulfilled themselves.
Once that became clear, the design system started revealing itself naturally.
Our Design Lead kept returning to nature while building the visual language. Because honestly, there is nothing more simple and wise than nature. Snowflakes, trajectories of birds, leaf venations, ant pathways, everything in nature still manages to function with astonishing clarity. Patterns repeat and systems adapt, while individual parts stay connected to a larger whole without chaos.
That became the foundation for the graphics.
The lines, dots, intersections, and flowing systems across the Simpliwise identity were inspired by natural patterns of connection and movement. The idea was not to decorate the brand with abstract shapes, but to visually express how healthy systems actually behave.
I think that is what narrative really does for design. It gives aesthetics a reason to exist. When the narrative is clear, design decisions stop feeling random. You are no longer choosing between “Option A” and “Option B.” You are simply asking: does this feel true to the story we are telling?
The Simpliwise identity came from that exact process. Not from trying to look modern, intelligent, or “consulting-ish,” but from understanding what the company believed about work, people, systems, and growth. Once the thinking became clear, the visuals almost started building themselves.
(A simply wise tip: When working on a brand identity project, the most important thing you can do is listen. My dad used to say, “Read the question paper carefully. The answer is usually hiding there.” Branding works similarly. If you enter a project carrying ready-made answers, you usually miss the most important things. The people building the company already know far more about their work, tensions, and purpose than you ever will. What they need from you is observation. For instance, at Simpliwise, the logo itself came from an offhand sentence during a call with one of the founding partners. We were discussing something completely unrelated when she casually said, “We are almost like scaffolding.” We immediately knew there couldn’t be get a better logo for them.)
