Confession: I have sat through more brand archetype workshops than I can count, and most of them made me a little sad. You know the drill. The twelve-archetype wheel, a quiz, "we're a Hero," a slide, and then nothing actually changes. We took one of the most powerful tools in branding and turned it into a personality test with nice fonts. Here's the thing that bugs me most. Archetypes are genuinely powerful. Used right, one can do more than a whole campaign. But we keep treating them like something spiritual we can't quite explain, when they actually work for reasons you can measure. So I finally wrote it all down. What archetypes really are, why they get used so poorly, and how to use one on purpose. Leaning on Claude Shannon and information theory, of all things... his understanding of communication is the key idea behind how i approach branding and how I came up with Constellations. Link below. Would genuinely love to know if it lands for you or if you think I'm wrong. https://www.thedarkpapers.com/p/a-mathematical-theory-of-archetypes

This is something I’ve been thinking about (and working on) for a while. After years of doing brand and creative work, and teaching these things at the graduate level for 15 years, I kept running into the same thing... creative decisions are harder than they should be. I work on large projects with lots of stakeholders, and I always thought too many cooks in the kitchen made for terrible work. And it did... until I figured out how to get each of those cooks to contribute the insights they have, see them in the context of everything else, and actually visualize what it all means. It turns out that inclusion truly is the best path forward, and how to build community around a brand, or really anything. That’s how Constellations came to be. And the more people we work with, the more we see how much clarity is already there once you have a way to make sense of it. This is a place to share what I’m learning, connect with others thinking about this in a similar way, and collaborate using a simple but surprisingly insightful approach to understanding how people respond to visuals. Glad you’re here. -Joe