How to burn an epic impression onto this world

Dark Branding is not a complicated thing. Which is not the same as being easy.

Branding means to leave an impression. Brand is an Old English word for 'burn'.

Dark Branding is the deepest, most meaningful way to to impress yourself upon the world. To burn yourself into its landscape.

In my philosophy, 'Dark' means the as-yet untapped hidden content – the secret raw material – within someone.

Your Dark Material is what makes you different. Different makes you dominate. Different beats better, every time. (I'd say 20+ years in marketing has taught me this – but I knew it when I was a child).

It's easy for me to find this Dark Material.

The hardest part is teaching clients to become their Dark Brand and to do so at A CERTAIN STANDARD. Holy hell, there is a lot of low-standard 'darkness' and 'difference' out there. And "gold on black" is very lazy, cliched Dark Branding (unless you're a master, like Klimt)

My standards run the show: I'm at their mercy. They come from my pedantic, laser-like Dark Nature – my inherent identity. And also from my university fine-art training. My curatorial degree. My obsession with detail. In truth, Dark Branding is really Art Branding. The artist's eye. Which I've been gifted with.

Long ago I decided that the outcome I wanted to create was to turn every client into a living work of art. That I would turn my own life into a work of art. And this is how Dark Branding is born.

The work of Dark Branding is 90% internal – meeting and honing and polishing your deepest identity – and only 10% external (by which I mean your clothes, your visual brand elements, your writing, your website etc).

Every client must go through the same rigorous archeological dig into their own brain and soul. Every client has an ethnology that I must uncover. There is no complicated curriculum for them to learn. But they must be ready to meet their identity and commit to the long-term excavation and expression of it.

Visually, I admit that I have un-meetable expectations. No-one in my world has met my expectations to date. No-one. I obsess over each client as something that must become a work of art that looks a certain way to me. Once clients leave my canvas they can damn well do what they want, visually and in their storytelling. But when they're in my field, they absolutely must meet certain visual (and vocabulary) standards. I'm forever fine-tuning details they can't see – but that make all the difference.