10?’s with The Brand Identity founder, writer & graphic designer, Elliott Moody

The main thing is consistency. We’ve shared projects on our site and socials five or six days a week since 2015. Whether it’s back when I was working full-time as a designer, writing and scheduling articles in the car on the way to work, or today where we have a great team that puts everything together like clockwork.

The other thing that helped us initially was probably the timing. In 2015, it was much easier to get a great name on Instagram and grow a following just by posting, as not many others were doing it.

I was interning at a studio in London called Campbell Hay (lovely people), and had some downtime most days. I either spent it learning to code (and failing) or looking at design blogs like BP&O and Brand New. I love those sites (still) and didn’t particularly set out to do something different to them – that wasn’t even really a thought. I just became obsessed with branding projects and wanted to share them on an Instagram account. What we’ve become now – writing about projects and studios, publishing books, making products – has developed one step at a time over the years. There’s more of a ‘master plan’ now, but back then, nothing was too thought out.

To be honest, no. Writing our own words about projects was just the natural next step after focusing on the visuals for the first few years. I think I just happened to be reasonably okay at looking at a studio’s case study text, asking them a few questions about the work, and combining them into a fairly short and functional article. We’ve since hired writers who are far better than me.

I believe the writing is important because there is so much to learn from every project, studio, brand and topic we feature. The visuals only do so much. We want each article or feature to provide the reader with some kind of inspiration or insight. The educational aspect of what we do has become one of our priorities in recent times.

No, I don’t think so. What has made our curation good over the years is probably that we don’t focus on either of those things. I don’t think we’ve used the word ‘trend’ once in our features – but don’t quote me on that! We also aren’t concerned with the reputation of the studios or brands that are submitting their work to us. Anyone can be featured if we like what they’re doing!

At the same time, I do like to think of our site as an archive of all the great projects – as the years go by. So, deciding what those are can be difficult, for sure. But at the end of the day, it mainly comes down to taste, intuition and an acceptance that we can’t feature everything!

The first interview series we did on the site was The Designers, and is still ongoing. We speak to employed designers at our favourite studios, usually below a senior level, to find out about their roles, day-to-day experiences, etc. We find it interesting to speak to the people that aren’t usually the ones representing the studio, but are the ones doing a lot of the work.

This naturally led to the idea of doing The Freelancers, when we sat down to decide on another interview series. Freelancers obviously have to deal with a lot more than just designing – finance, new business, uncertainty – so we try to talk about those things with some of the best out there.

I wouldn’t say I need to escape from it. I try not to take it for granted that I’m able to look at graphic design as a job.

But I do love gaming. So, I play lots of Zelda :)

I don’t think so. The projects I like, I just like. And those I don’t think, I try to leave at just that without being too critical. As a designer, I’m much more functional/detail-orientated than I am creative, so I don’t know if I even have it in me to look at other people’s work and think about how I would do it differently!

I’ve been working on TBI full-time since around 2019, which has flown by! I’ve been fully absorbed in it since then, and we now have a core team of six that are instrumental in everything we do.

The design work we do now is all for TBI, from books and social media assets to a few things I won’t mention just yet ;)

We’re trying to become the resource that graphic design professionals can rely on. Need some inspiration? Go to TBI. Need to learn something? Go to TBI. Need an asset or product? Go to TBI. The list could go on. Essentially, we want to cover all of the needs of a graphic designer in one place. Still a long way to go!

1. The way the project is presented needs to be amazing. Great photography, mockups and assets are a given, but also how it’s sent to us. The folder structure, image order and file naming are all things that can be influential when we’re trying to understand a project for the first time. Sometimes it’s so chaotic and unorganised, which can be offputting. Obviously, that’s not everyone’s strong suit, but it really goes a long way.

2. We really appreciate a proper text explaining the concept and thinking behind the project. Again, this isn’t everyone’s forté, but even a short paragraph can make us like and understand it much more than if it was purely visual. Sometimes we just receive a Behance link with no explanation, for example, and it just instantly gives you less chance than other submissions.

3. Send a nice email, not one that’s clearly been spammed to 30 other sites and doesn’t even say hello!

4. Bonus tip, we have submission guidelines on our site that outline exactly what we need and how we work. A DM on Instagram saying ‘REPOST PLZ’ isn’t going to get very far!