Features

The Scoop with Collins

Transform chats with Brian Collins, co-founder of San Francisco and New York-based creative consultancy Collins, about how brand design creates value, his agency’s relationship with AI and what the brand design world ought to be talking about.

What’s the purpose of brand design?

Good question. But a more specific question might be: How does brand design create value? Because in the end, the creation of value is the real driving force here. Value for people. Value for the company.

So, the way we see it, all value is perceived value. Gold is just a yellow rock. A Birkin bag is only leather and thread, even if insanely well-crafted. A product, a service, a company—they’re only worth what people think they’re worth.

That’s part of what branding does. But it does not, not, not produce value out of thin air—it creates, reveals, shapes, and amplifies the value that was already there, but overlooked. A company can have the best product or the most brilliant service in the world, but if no one sees or understands its real worth, what does it matter?

If that tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound? It’s simple. No. If a company offers real value but no one understands it, does it exist? Not for long.

Few CEOs study design. They study finance, economics, supply chains and portfolio management. All good, remarkable skills. They can calculate the financial value of their organisations down to decimal points. But in all of that dazzling focus, all of that discipline, some can overlook the story part. The art part. The beauty part.

The parts that create emotional resonance for people. The part where people don’t buy based on logic or price. They buy on meaning.

That’s where brand design comes in. It’s the bridge between cold, necessary, unemotional business fundamentals and the way people actually experience a company. It transforms a product from "something you could buy" into "something you can’t live without."

Brand design gives people a reason to care. In this way, I think brands help shape the future. They “make the future so irresistible it can become inevitable,” as my co-founder of Collins, Leland Maschmeyer, says.

The way we see it? Brands are the mentors of things to come.

How does Collins use AI to create value?

We’ve been working with AI for years. Spotify, Equinox, Bose—all of those projects have key AI components. AI is a previously unimaginable tool. And like all technology, it makes things easier. The printing press made books easier to produce. The assembly line made cars easier to build. AI is now doing the same thing for intellectual and creative work.

But here’s where it gets complicated: creativity isn’t just output. It’s a process of discovery.

Writing isn’t just putting words in order—it’s how you figure out what you actually think. AI doesn’t think. It just compiles, synthesises, predicts. The risk is that companies will start using it to generate everything, and in doing so, they may lose the very thing that makes their brand valuable: originality.

That’s why we see AI not as artificial intelligence, but as alien intelligence. You can either figure out how to work with it, or you can wait for it to replace you. We’re choosing to engage with it, to learn its language, to use it in a way that enhances creativity instead of erasing it. Because in the end, what gives a brand value is not just what it produces, but how alive and engaging it feels. And, at least for now, AI is never going to do that better than an actual human at the controls.

What should the design community be talking about?

Most design conferences are about how to do things. New tools, new techniques, new products. Fine. But too few are asking why?

And here’s why that matters: when you spend all your time focused on how, you forget that design does not just communicate value but creates value—not just for companies, but for real people. Your mom, your son, your wife or husband, your neighbours.

A brand is not just a design system. It’s a world of experience and meaning. Done right, it makes a company beyond indispensable. Done wrong, it’s more clatter in the cacophony of consumerism. More noise.

And we’re all seeing far too much noise, lately. In fact, the whole industry seems to be stuck in a noisy house of mirrors.

That’s why we’ve built a five-acre forest retreat on the Atlantic coast of New England—not for “brainstorming” nor “ideation,” but for thinking. For stepping away from all that noise and focusing on what might actually matter. Four of our team members are up there right now, not making decks, not hosting Post-it fiestas, not sitting in meetings—just reading, thinking, absorbing and imagining the future of technology with a client.

Because the fastest way to create value isn’t by doing more. It’s by understanding why you’re really doing it in the first place.

And if you’re in design, if you’re in branding, if you’re in any field where meaning and perception matter—this should be your focus. Not just how to make things, but why they can matter.

And that’s the realest value there is. Well, that and making sure your kerning pairs are, you know, perfect.

Because you can have all the best ideas in the world, but good craft, good execution in building a brand, will still carry the day.

And that's what gets everyone here at Collins up and out the door every day.