Brand as Interface – Conversation with Chloe Gottlieb, UX Director Google

At R/GA, Marc and I would talk at length about the changing state of Design. We were working with our teams at the forefront of creating brand ecosystems of digital products and connected services. Until then, Brand Design was represented graphically through signifiers, described by a set of emotions, and shared in media via logos and in branded marketing campaigns. When the client would ask “was the creative work on brand” … they were asking if the story matched a set of visual and emotional principals brand designers established within beautiful brand books, often hundreds of pages long.  Until xxx (year), we were still operating within the conventional realms of Brand.

However, our teams of Interaction / UX/ Visual Designers were already thinking about designing behaviors, micro interactions and building brand system architecture. Through our work with R/GA and Nike + we could see that the most valuable brand experiences were happening via digital product interfaces, leading to deeper relationships between people and brands. And increasingly, “brand love” was determined by the last great (or poor) digital product experience people had with a Brand that day. Early days of Apple and Google products showed us that when branded interfaces were connected within a larger system, each product node became more valuable. 

Brands as Patterns was written during this seismic shift in business … and its hypothesis still stands today. People's relationships with Brands, products and services were moving beyond marketing. Through the branded product interface, they assumed a level of interaction and value that transformed business. Saying was giving way to doing, and this changed the nature of Brands and Brand Design. 

When Marc and I were colleagues, the two fields of Brand Design and Interaction Design had massive overlap that had not yet been identified. The first essay on “Brands as Patterns” established a new perspective on Brand Design. And a parallel outcome was that it asked us to reconsider Interaction Design — how to intentionally express the brand through an interface, which hadn't been part of the discipline, but has become the force multiplier behind the brands we choose to interact with, and to invest our most valuable possession, time. 

~ Chloe Gottlieb, UX Director, Google