The Dieline gets the chance to sit down with the design team at Backbone Branding, winners of 1st Place Fresh & Prepared Foods at The Dieline Awards 2015, to talk to them about their design process.
1. Congratulations on winning 1st place Fresh & Prepared Foods at The Dieline Awards! There were a number of wonderful designs this year. What, in your opinion, sets apart a good design from a great one?
There is a difference between good design and the great one, and it is a purposefulness.The quality of great design is mirrored exactly in the purpose and content that serve for creating something great in this sphere, which maximally express the brand essence.The great design should always be structured around a content. It is never self-purposed; otherwise, it is fated to downfall.
2. What is Backbone Branding’s design philosophy?
Imagination for inspiring transformation. Imagine for the sake of creating the new.The philosophy of our studio is a purposeful design, which mirrors the brand essence.
3. What is your design process?
The most important part of our design process is the brand understanding, analyzing its essence and studying its sphere. After digesting the gained information, we are passing to next stage of understanding the designing process. It helps to make the product functional while creating.
The client is always in the epicentrum of the process. He is not just an observer for us, and is always integrated into the process. We are challenged to generate an interest in the process of creating for him. Everything inside the designing process should have an idea and spirit, in order to express the essence of the brand, until then, every essence has a spirit.The process is fulfilled with the visualization elements, which sequence understanding comes from the first stage of the process. The first stage is important, as in the second stage, it becomes obvious how you have imagined the brand essence.
4. What makes Backbone Branding unique from other design studios?
Our team has a consciousness, that the thing we do is not just a design. We fix on the first stage analyzing so seriously, that our activity becomes not just a design. We think that it is an overcoming of challenges, and the challenge is an idea, a content and a visualization, that maximally mirrors the brand essence. We do not have a supreme goal of becoming different from the others, but our main goal is to make a design, that has a soulful essence and is alive.
5. Where do you find your inspiration?
We find our inspiration everywhere and inside everything. Sometimes, it comes from a place you do not expect. Our reality is full of inspiring elements, the question is, how you will accept that elements influence and if you are open to them. The inspiration is a prism through which you look, and it is very important not to miss it.
6. How do you find the harmony between creativity and commerciality?
Creativity is inside everything, and it is kind, when you challenge yourself to make it for people. It is like a good music, that makes you feel glorious the moment you listen to it. Creativity often makes the project so successful that it solves the question with the commerciality. It means creativity itself, stimulates the market. These two elements are in a permanent interrelation and a good creativity can easily provide a successful commerciality.
Creating any product, we try to create something that will be bought not only for need but also for pleasure. Besides anything created for humanity and for people serving, automatically becomes commercial. That is why we select our projects attentively and principally do not develop any product that can do harm to humanity or nature, starting from bioactive supplements and tobacco finishing with gambling.
7. What types of projects excite you the most? Is there a particular quality they all have in common?
We are mostly excited and inspired by the projects that have a space to implement positiveness. The conclusory property of all the projects that excite us is interactivity. Again, this is not incidental. We think when one can play with the product, can integrate and live with it, the possibility that the product will be successful becomes absolute. Besides that, the advanced technologies create a market of interactive products nowadays.
8. What can clients expect when working with you?
Patience, qualified solvation of the challenge and of course friendship.
9. What are the biggest challenges you encounter as a designer, and how do you overcome them?
The challenges, we think are biggest for us, are quality, functionality, content, serving to our goals. Breaking the rules for the sake of reaching the main goal the solvation of the challenge.
10. What is your most valuable advice to an aspiring designer?
Move ahead! Only ahead, and soon you will find your way. Never be disappointed, cause your way will not always be silky.
