BASE DESIGN x FLORA

Most studios treat a brand identity as something you finish. You design the system, write the guidelines, hand it over, and the job is done. Base Design believes that the brand identity is more than just that now. An identity has to move, to keep living long after the handoff, because a studio that builds fixed things for a moving world eventually falls behind its own work.

Base Design is an international network of creative studios in Brussels, New York, Geneva, Melbourne, Saigon, and our Digital studio. A company of cultures transforming ideas into clarity, and clarity into brands that last. But what they’re truly creating is meaning: meaning for brands, cultural relevance, and ultimately for emotional connection.

How to use Techniques

At Base, the team tries to visualize the finished result as early as possible. That’s where FLORA comes in with Techniques. Techniques are repeatable workflows built with your team’s creative context all embedded in. Combined with Base’s philosophy with brand building, they us Techniques to create high-fidelity mockups of concepts as quickly as possible.

As Ross Gendels puts it: “[Techniques] give us a better idea of whether it’s the right neighborhood for the brand, and it helps us make these bigger moves quicker.”

How do we celebrate creativity?

That’s the question that Darius Wang, senior designer at Base Design, thinks about. It’s a big question, and it usually leads to the team exploring two very different directions. The challenge is then giving each direction the right opportunity to be explored and mocked up.

Techniques came in as the solution to help the team quickly spin up mocks, even when the initial creative direction is so different. As a part of these mockups, the teams created a Brand Extension Technique, focused on allowing them to explore options and iterate quickly. In the Technique, Base is able to explore logo options, color palettes, different mockups, marketing headlines, patterns, and even shirt mockups in just seconds.

From there, they’re able to quickly explore different brand identities, and allow them to see where the brand takes shape that resonates with the team.

Techniques goes beyond just initial quick exploration, but becomes a durable workflow artifact. After doing their brand exploration, Base landed on a Tarot Card Generator Technique, something that reflected the studio’s personality and brand. That’s the power that Technique offers world class creative, the ability to push ideas in a million directions, while also honing in what to deliver and share.

The future of work

“With the introduction of AI, that whole relationship between studio and client, I think is going to change. What we end up handing over in the future is going to be super different than what we’re currently handing over now.”

Brand identity is a living breathing thing, something that has to be nurtured and sustained over time. At Base Design, Techniques are a deliverable that can be handed to a client, that sustains the creative context and decisions made throughout the process.

“A tool that allows for ideation, system making, and then deploying that system and being able to use the same or similar tool to actually control the deployment, check the validity, evolve the system, and sort of that continuous process living in the world.”

FLORA is building the future of creative tools that last.

To see how you can use Techniques in your work today, click here.