The Shape of What's Left Out

Abstract

Most brands start with too much: a deck of values, a list of features, a moodboard that wants everything at once. Alex Longson argues that the story is already there, and the designer's first job is to remove what hides it.

Drawing on a decade of building and repositioning brands, from co-founding and exiting CombiniCo to leading identity work for American Express, Mastercard and a run of fast-growing start-ups, he shows a working method for finding a company's narrative in days rather than months: reduce the idea to three shapes, give those shapes room, and let the empty space do the talking.

The talk closes with the question the festival theme poses to every founder: if you took almost everything away, what would still be recognisably you?

In this talk

• A three-shape method for finding a brand narrative in a single workshop
• Why fast-growing companies lose their story at the Series A, and how to keep it
• Yohaku as a commercial tool: what white space does for recall and price
• Case notes from CombiniCo, a venture-studio repositioning, and two start-up exits

About the speaker

Alex Longson is a British-American multidisciplinary art director based between Italy, the UK and Japan. In 2017 he co-founded CombiniCo, a Korean minimal fast-food brand, and served as its art director for three years. During that time the company scaled to a $3M valuation and won national awards including Best Commercial Design 2019. He exited the company in 2020.

He then founded Longson Studio, where he leads aesthetic and strategic repositioning projects in association with a venture studio, working with global corporations and fast-growing start-ups. Recent clients include American Express, Sabre, Conferma, Santander and Mastercard. His private clients are among the fastest-growing brands in their industries, raising or exiting at a cumulative value of more than $300M.

Alex is known for helping start-ups find their story fast, and for a method that builds brand narrative out of shapes and empty space rather than slogans. Alongside the studio he co-directs the design theory magazine Command+i, featured on Channel 4's George Clarke's Amazing Spaces and distributed in 50 countries. He is currently building a 15-acre sustainable lavender micro-farm in northern Tuscany.