Designing a New Brand Starts Before the Logo: Inside the HEART Lab Project

When most people think about “starting a brand project,” they picture logos, colors, and maybe a moodboard full of pretty references.

For HEART Lab—a research lab studying how the brain processes emotionally charged information in development, especially in marginalized communities—the real work starts much earlier. It begins with questions, contradictions, and a process that makes sure the brand doesn’t just look good, but actually serves the people it needs to reach.

This is an active project I’m working on right now. Along the way, a friend asked me about my process, and his questions surfaced a few principles I rely on every time I help a team define (or redefine) who they are.

This post is a look inside that process.

Step One: Choose a Leader, Then Ask Better Questions 

One of the first things my friend asked was:

“What happens if multiple people answer your discovery questions and they contradict each other?”

That scenario is almost guaranteed on a complex team. Researchers, coordinators, leadership, community partners—everyone sees the lab from a slightly different angle.

So before any questions go out, we choose a team lead.

That person becomes:

• The primary point of contact

• The arbiter of internal feedback

• The one responsible for consolidating many voices into a clear direction

By the time discovery responses come back to me, they’re not a raw dump of opinions. They’re already filtered, synthesized, and prioritized by someone who understands the internal politics and pressures better than I ever could from the outside.

That single decision—assigning a lead—protects the project from “too many cooks” and turns discovery into a focused conversation instead of a group chat.

Goals and Anti‑Goals: Defining What the Brand Should Never Become 

Another part of the HEART Lab discovery that caught my friend’s attention was the way I frame goals and anti-goals.

Goals are familiar:

• Who do we want to reach?

• How should the brand feel?

• What kind of opportunities should this identity unlock?

But anti-goals often unlock more clarity:

• What do we not want to be confused with?

• What visual tropes feel wrong for this audience?

• What would make our participants or partners distrust this brand?

My friend put it well: sometimes the anti-goals are “super important if not more important.”

For HEART Lab, anti-goals help draw a hard line between:

• Warm vs. patronizing

• Community-oriented vs. clinical or cold

• Serious research vs. inaccessible or intimidating

Goals create opportunity. Anti-goals create boundaries. Together, they define a mental “box” I can design inside of—where almost any direction I explore will still feel right for the team and the people they serve.

Why Boilerplate Discovery Fails (And How to Make It Feel Bespoke) 

Another thing my friend noticed reading through the HEART Lab discovery: the questions felt tailored, not off-the-shelf.

Behind the scenes, yes, I have a core set of prompts I return to. But I almost never send them out as-is.

Every client wants to feel like their work is understood. Sending a completely generic questionnaire is a subtle way of signaling the opposite.

So for HEART Lab, I:

• Rewrote section headings to match their world (e.g., focusing on “participants,” “communities,” and “collaborators” rather than generic “customers” or “users”).

• Adjusted examples and language to acknowledge their specific context: academic rigor, trauma-informed practices, marginalized communities.

• Removed questions that weren’t relevant to a research lab, and added a few that only make sense in their space.

The content of the questions is grounded in good strategy fundamentals. But the framing is specific enough that the team can see themselves in it. As my friend put it, once you understand what’s at the root of the questions, you can see exactly why each one is being asked.

That’s intentional—and it’s where theory turns into a real relationship.

Bringing the Client Along: Moodboards as Working Prototypes 

When we moved from words into visuals for HEART Lab, I built out multiple brand personas and moodboards. My friend’s reaction captured what I’m trying to do with that stage:

“The moodboard represents possible or typical assets that you may see on the website. Each brand persona handles that asset in a different way in alignment with your visual concept. Clever.”

Moodboards, in this context, aren’t just a wall of inspiration. They’re mini prototypes of how the brand might show up in the real world:

• A social post that could actually go live

• A simple landing page hero

• A research flyer or participant handout

• A slide or data visualization frame

Each board answers the same question differently: “If HEART Lab were a person, how would they show up here?”

This makes the review conversation much more concrete. Instead of debating abstract adjectives—“Is this warm enough?” “Does this feel too corporate?”—we can react to specific, plausible scenarios. That helps non-designers read the work and participate in the decision-making with more confidence.

When a Direction Is Chosen, Everything Shifts 

My friend also asked what happens after the moodboard is approved:

“As you progress with this branding, will you start to see some of the decisions appearing in your template presentation?”

For HEART Lab, once a direction is chosen, I move the entire working environment into that look and feel:

• Presentation templates

• Sample web layouts

• Diagrams and visual frameworks

• Any shared documents or decks we use to collaborate

The template becomes the theater screen for the brand. Every decision we make from that point lives inside the chosen system.

This does a few important things at once:

• It’s more efficient long-term; I’m not reinventing the frame every time.

• It gives the client extra assets they can keep using after the project ends.

• It forces the brand to prove itself in real, practical contexts, not just in a static style guide.

And because this HEART Lab project is live, these templates are evolving in real time as the identity sharpens. I’m already seeing which choices hold up under pressure and which ones need to be tuned before we commit them to final documentation.

Why This Process Matters (Especially for Teams Like HEART Lab) 

Stepping back from the details, this HEART Lab work has been a reminder of something simple but easy to overlook:

A good brand process doesn’t just create a nice logo. It creates shared clarity.

• A team lead keeps many voices from turning into noise.

• Goals and anti-goals frame the problem from both sides, so we know where not to go.

• Bespoke discovery shows respect for the client’s world and earns trust early.

• Moodboards tied to real assets let non-designers make informed, confident choices.

• Bringing the chosen direction into every working template turns theory into a day-to-day experience.

Because this is an active project, I’m still in the middle of testing decisions, refining the system, and seeing how it performs against HEART Lab’s real-world needs.

But even at this stage, one thing is clear: when you design the process with as much intention as the visuals, the final identity has a much better chance of feeling human, aligned, and ready for the real world the moment it launches.

If you’re leading a lab, startup, or initiative and thinking, “We probably need a new brand,” a good first step isn’t picking a color—it’s picking the right questions, the right people in the room, and a process that lets everyone see themselves in the answer.