Every category develops a visual dialect: the same blues, the same photography, the same confident sans-serif. Recognising it is the first step to stepping outside it.
Map the territory
The Human Experience Co. coaches senior leaders through organisational change, and its old mark (an H and an X, each in its own circle, joined by a line, set in blue on white) was the default look of management consulting. That says more about the category than about this one mark: the blue-on-white palette, the balanced geometric monogram, the restraint that reads as “serious” because every firm in the space has agreed to signal seriousness the same way. You can’t see that a look is generic until you’ve lined it up next to everyone else using it.
The brief named the field directly: two competitors, MindsOpen and August, with an explicit instruction that the new mark and palette needed to look like nobody on that list. Naming them turned a vague goal (“look different”) into a specific one (“look like neither of these two, in particular”), which is a brief a designer can actually test concepts against.
How to build the map
You can do a useful version of this in a morning. It needs a folder and a spreadsheet.
Pick the field. List the six to ten brands your buyer is most likely to compare you with. Include the obvious competitors, one or two larger firms buyers measure you against, and anyone who appears when you search for your own service. The Human Experience Co.’s buyers compare it with Korn Ferry and Deloitte as well as its direct competitors, so all of those belong on its map.
Capture the same things for each. Take a screenshot of each homepage above the fold, the LinkedIn banner and avatar, and one piece of sales material if you can find it. Same sizes, same folder.
Record the values. For each brand, write down:
- The type of mark: wordmark, monogram, abstract symbol or pictorial symbol.
- The main colour as a hex value, plus any accent.
- The typeface style: geometric sans, humanist sans, serif or something unusual.
- The photography: people, objects, abstract, or none.
- The first headline on the homepage, word for word.
Look for what most of them share. Lay the screenshots out in a grid and sort the spreadsheet by each column. If seven out of ten use a blue, a geometric sans and a headline about trusted partnership, that is the category’s dialect. Write it down as a sentence.
Find the gap, and make it a decision
Once the category’s default is named, the gap is usually the thing the default refuses to do. Management consulting’s blue-on-white palette signals restraint and balance, so the gap was warmth and collaboration: softer, more organic shapes in place of the old mark’s strict geometry, a circular arrangement of several elements in place of a single symmetric line, and one bright colour used deliberately where the category is cautious and monochrome. Each choice was a direct answer to something the category’s visual dialect had agreed not to do.
A gap is only worth owning if it fits the positioning. Warmth suited The Human Experience Co. because the client described the brand as energising, empathetic, compassionate, friendly and dedicated. A firm whose buyers want caution above all would be wrong to chase the same gap. Before you commit, check it against the buyer and the one idea in your positioning.
Compare the actual values
The part of this process that’s easy to skip is checking your own output against a competitor’s at the level of the actual values. Once The Human Experience Co.’s new identity had a real teal in it, we checked that teal directly against a named competitor’s own teal: ours sits on the green side of the hue, theirs leans blue. Nobody would catch that comparing mood boards. It’s the difference between thinking you look different and knowing it, in hex values, before the mark ever ships.
Do the same with typefaces. Two brands in different colours can still look related if they share a geometric sans and similar headline lengths. On Sovato, the client had grown fond of Montserrat. We recommended Termina, because Termina reads as technical and engineered and Montserrat is used so widely that it carries little character of its own. The client agreed.
Borrow the reasoning from outside your category
Sometimes the most useful reference isn’t a competitor at all. On Online Speechie, a speech-pathology brand for parents of late talkers, the brief pointed to Lovevery, a children’s product brand entirely outside the category, as a reference for how colour should feel: warm without tipping into saccharine. That’s borrowing a principle. Copying a direct competitor’s colours gets you mistaken for them. Borrowing the reasoning behind a brand that solved a similar emotional problem, in a different market, gets you somewhere a competitor audit alone never would.
What came out of it was specific to Online Speechie. The client kept its yellow, and we moved it to a lighter, sunnier shade that sat better with the teal, then added purple because it suits both. None of that looks like Lovevery. It answers the same question Lovevery answered, for a different audience.
What not to take from a competitor
Some things are fair to learn from. Others put the brand at risk.
- Fair to learn: which touchpoints they invest in, how they structure a homepage, what they promise in the first line, which buyers they seem to target.
- Leave alone: their colours, their mark’s shape, their tagline, their photography style and any phrase a buyer would associate with them.
If a concept makes someone say “that looks a bit like…”, take it seriously even when the resemblance is accidental. Buyers don’t check whether it was deliberate.
When the market tells you something uncomfortable
Reading the category also means reading your own concepts the way a stranger would, especially when the feedback is unflattering. On Sovato, an early logomark built around converging, organic lines was meant to read as advanced and architectural. Instead, a few people on the client’s own team saw seaweed. The shape was landing in the wrong part of the visual dialect, closer to “natural” or “biological” than “deep tech”, and it was far cheaper to hear that from a colleague’s offhand comment than from the market after launch. The next round rethought that concept as two new marks, and the client chose a compact monogram of two interlocking halves.
Show shortlisted concepts to a few people outside the project and ask one question: what does this remind you of? Write down every answer, including the ones that sting. The same discipline that maps a competitor’s blue-on-white sameness has to turn on your own work too, or you’ll spend the budget avoiding a copy of your rivals and still end up looking like something nobody meant to make.
Common mistakes in competitor reviews
- Mapping only direct competitors. Buyers compare you with whatever else they might choose, including large firms and in-house teams.
- Reacting to one brand. If the review turns into “we must not look like X”, the result usually looks like X’s opposite and nothing else. Map the whole field.
- Stopping at impressions. “Theirs feels corporate” is a start. A hex value and a typeface name are something a designer can act on.
- Choosing a gap nobody wants. An empty corner of the map can be empty for a reason. Check it against what your buyers value.
If you’d like help reading your own category, it’s part of the discovery work at the start of every brand identity project. Or start smaller with the free audit: a 30-minute call with Aidar, followed by a one-page summary with your top three fixes. Book your free audit.
