This blog is inspired by a recent client testimonial from isla co-founder, Anna. You can view our work with isla here.

“Working with Two Stories has been such a brilliant experience. Bekkie and Rob have been such a responsive team, supporting us to make the creative calls that are right for our brand as well as helping us shape and align our message by being very reflective and calm throughout.

We threw a bit of a curveball their way with a very tight deadline and they went above and beyond to ensure that we had a brand that we loved. As a company with clients of our own, we know what it can be like to have requests thrown at you left, right, and centre but Bekkie and Rob expertly helped us to prioritise and were clear and communicative, helping us to manage our expectations but at the same time working hard to deliver everything we needed.

The main thing that drew us to Two Stories was their varied range of projects. Looking through their portfolio we could see that they would communicate our brand’s message and identity without being a one-trick-pony agency that churns out one style over and over again.

A small team with big hearts and open minds. I can highly recommend working with Two Stories.”

Her words helped me cement that our process is built upon extensive research and discovery and that’s why our portfolio is diverse, it’s informed design.

Being a creative, you can get inspired daily by different moments, subjects, people, and environments. Inspiration can come from all sorts of unlikely points of interest and you can be subliminally inspired all the time.

But what does this mean to us?

One of my all-time favourite artists, Anthony Burrill, is a graphic artist, printmaker, and designer. You may know him best for his iconic typographic piece Work Hard and Be Nice to People. This piece is not only known all over the world but has unfortunately been subject to imitation and reproduction by different people all over the world. Burrill told It’s Nice That that “almost 100 versions of his print WORK HARD & BE NICE TO PEOPLE” exist on Etsy alone. So it got me thinking… where is the line between imitation and inspiration and how does this become relevant to the brand-building process?

In a world where access to other designers, studios, artists and creatives work is at our fingertips it’s easy to research and become visually inspired. But you can’t build a brand on that right? And how do you know the studio you are working with will be unique to you?

Find your own voice

Be unique, what do people say in a world full of copies, ‘be original’. At Two Stories we recognise how important it is to take inspiration to inform not recreate. We use extensive research to encourage experimentation and to design for purpose.

And this is important in order to create long-lasting beautiful designs. In order to make a brand memorable it should be inspired and unique.

This specific point Anna made in her testimonial summed us up perfectly:

“The main thing that drew us to Two Stories was their varied range of projects. Looking through their portfolio we could see that they would communicate our brand’s message and identity without being a one-trick-pony agency that churns out one style over and over again.”

We pride ourselves in our brand process that each workshop, each research stage, and each step in the process is a point of discovery unearthing the foundations on which the brand should be built upon. In a world where “everything has been done before” we try and inform our design process through development and experimentation.

Above all, we design with purpose and is informed by the core business objectives.