How to tell your story in 300 milliseconds or less

In the first 300 milliseconds you’ve either captured your audience's attention, or lost it. Since I’ve now got yours, I hope you’ll enjoy this quick primer on what goes into a brand and the subconscious StoryMotivated power a brand can have.

A Primer

It is generally accepted that people make their initial opinions about people, products, and brands within the first few seconds. In those precious first seconds the impression that your brand creates will have a major impact on how long someone interacts with you, and what the future of that relationship looks like.

There are a lot of factors that go into this attention capturing work. Many of them are tied to the aesthetics of the brand. Studies have shown that color, font, images, and shape are all processed in those first few seconds.

Color Meanings

In the classic text Color: messages and meanings, Leatrice Eisman drives home that no matter your profession you should be informed about color “as a means of instant communication”. She takes the time to review the meaning of both color families and individual shades in the context of the western world view. Eisman’s work is one of the simplest ways to begin turning your subliminal impressions into language which can be discussed and shared on your creative teams.

More recently Sara Musselman Executive Creative Director at Vidmob drove home colors value. In a report called “The Role of Color in Creative Campaigns” Musselman discussed the subconscious influence of  color. Her bold claim, based on the data collected by their platform: “Color is the core lever to pull when expressing brand identity, amplifying messaging and attracting an audience.”

Font Relationships

Choosing fonts can be trickier than colors. Often ignored, these “invisible” transmitters of words send messages we receive and interpret alongside every product, logo, and text we see. And usually, we “just know” when it’s not right.
Sarah Hyndman, author of Why Fonts Matter, likens picking the right font for your brand to speed dating. You are presented with a range of options and must quickly determine which ones fit with your brand based on past experiences and subconscious understandings.

Those same initial understandings of a typeface, Hydman notes, help people decide who to trust and who is professional in business settings. Over time Hyndman has observed that “Famous brand logos can often be recognised from the type alone” (16). And that the “complex visual cues” given by a typeface saves people time in their everyday lives (20).

Armed with this knowledge you can see how fonts reflect different values, fonts are something your audience is “acutely aware” of, and why fonts should be carefully considered when you make changes to your brand (16).

Images for the Brand

On behalf of Skylight Media Agency our team explored aspects of a pizza brand that showed almost no people in their social media images. Lots of pizza, but few people engaged with the brand.

For some pizza brands, perhaps one focused on aesthetics, this pizza first strategy might work well. It showcases the product, and that’s the star of the show right?

However, what we learned from conducting both primary and secondary research into the brand, is that their particular pizza is eaten primarily in social settings. To not show those human interactions, the smiling people, the different locations, and tie-ins with events happening in the local community was a missed opportunity to show who the brand is.

There is a clear disconnect between the images they were showing and the contextual culture they desired to create. To corner the market on college-aged-pizza-eaters (and those nostalgic for their college days), we recommended showing memory-making moments as a way forward for the brand.

This might be an extreme example, but holds an important truth. You need to carefully think not just about the product you are trying to sell, but the broader stories that surround it. Choosing images is as much about inclusion as omission. If done well, selecting the right images can also push your brand further in the direction of your aspirations, even if you are not there yet.

Shape

Shape is a homophone, so it has two different meanings. Something that I’m going to take full advantage of.

Concretely, shape is the form of an object. Studies have shown that the physical shape of an object, product, or design element can influence the decision making process. When a product or logo’s shape is in alignment with other color, typography, and images interpretation by the consumer is made easier, and they are more likely to have a positive reaction.

Abstractly, shape is the overall being of your brand. What some have called a brand culture. There are a lot of ways that understanding behavior through beliefs and goals can shape your brand. Your mission (beliefs) and vision (goals) will determine the central stories around which your brand is built.

Pushing people toward being a certain “shape” is a tricky balance. So I’ll leave it to Mark Miller and Ted Vaughn, from their book Culture Built My Brand, to explain:

“If you don’t have Vocabulary giving your team concrete direction for how to behave and do their work you’re missing out on a powerful builder of culture” (150-151) A vocabulary, as defined by Miller and Vaughn is: “A lexicon of clearly defined words and phrases helping your employees understand what’s important in your brand and how to drive it forward” (146).

“When you find words or phrases that are producing off-brand behavior and negative outcomes, commit with your team to retire them. Or you can modify them so that they guide your people to better perform on-brand” (150).

If you’re looking to take some time to build a vocabulary for your brand we recommend checking out Miller and Vaughn’s vocabulary workshop on pages 155-157 of the first edition of their book.

Faster Than We Thought

In 2021 Aiqin Shi, Faren Huo, and Guanhua Hou published Effects of Design aesthetics on the perceived Value of a Product in Frontiers in Psychology. They found that your window for making an aesthetic impression is even shorter than previously thought. Instead of seconds to make an impression, you only have thousandths of a second.

In the first 100 to 150 milliseconds you’ve already had your attention captured by visual stimulus. Between 150 and 200 milliseconds you have begun identification processing of color, shape, and material. At 200 to 300 milliseconds, if you are still paying attention, your brain taps into emotional arousal. By the first half second you’ve already begun figuring out if there are inconsistencies between the messaging of different non-verbal stimuli.

That’s why the attention you provide to anything is so important. How many brands impressed their meanings on to you during those few minutes or even just seconds of scrolling on social media?

At this point you are probably thinking, “Most people are influenced that easily, but not me!” This is something psychologists like to call the “third-person effect”. When we think that we are less susceptible than others to the messaging we encounter on a daily basis. What they’ve found is that universally we are influenced to take actions based on messaging.

If you have seven extra minutes take a look at this case study which I first saw over a decade ago and really emphasizes just how fast people can be impressed.

Now your mother probably told you to not judge a book by its cover, but as an entrepreneur, founder, or creative in charge of designing that cover for your brand, it sure seems like there is a lot riding on it.

Making Brand Decisions

With so many important decisions that need to be made when designing and maintaining a brand, how do you make sure you’ve made the right ones?

The best method we’ve found here at Visten Creative is to lean into the story you want to tell. By understanding your story more clearly, it makes it much easier to determine if a color, font, image, or shape is right for your brand.

StoryMotivated decision making can take many forms and have many different outcomes. Our process begins with a core idea, and then we find the fastest way to communicate the message to your audience. Studies have shown that stimuli such as graphics “that can be easily processed” generally inspire favorable attitudes.

Let's take a look at a few case studies from past brand development here at Visten Creative.

Visten Creative’s Color Pallet

When we started work on our own brand here at Visten Creative we knew the story had to hold a lot together. We wanted to create the next iteration of our founder and principal designer Andrew Pruim’s brand. We also wanted to create space to work on joint projects with other creatives, continue working with great clients, and highlight local creatives on missions for good.

After much soul searching and market testing, we settled on the core idea of capturing visions through listening to the stories others had to tell: “Vision Listening” or Visten as it is known today. Once this decision was made we were able to base our other aesthetic decisions through this lens.

We wanted to be a trusted place that both local practitioners, current, and future clients turned to for thought leadership and education. This led to the selection of blues that would elicit trust and education responses. We also wanted to be able to draw people’s attention to specific items and convince them to act so we incorporated orange into our work as an accent color.

Cinder Entertainment’s Wordmark Font

Finding the right balance in font choices can be tricky. Usually you can trust your gut instinct or follow the conventions of your industry to get you in the right ballpark, but sometimes nothing “out there” matches the story of your brand “in here”.

That’s the challenge we had when working on brand design for Cinder Entertainment. We found many different fonts that had elements we liked, but nothing that captured all the aspects. We had learned through the story process that Cinder aimed to make bold statements about society and culture, while balancing their new creative with a retro science fiction feel.

In the end for Cinder we created a custom typeface for their logo. Not only does it make sure that their wordmarks and logo are one of a kind, it also allowed us more flexibility in styling. The result was a font you would expect to see alongside classic space content, that also pushes stylistic boundaries for years to come.

Conclusion

We hope this brief introduction to the use of color, font, image, and shape shows the role Story can play in selecting options for your brand. Wield this power wisely as you attempt to capture people’s attention in those precious first milliseconds.

Experience “Vision Listening” for yourself. It will be worth it.