History doesn’t repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes.

Brian Collins

I scribbled this down earlier today during a Zoom presentation with Brian Collins and Nick Ace from Collins, Elizabeth Talerman from Nucleus, and Chris Harold from Mohawk discussing their recent collaborative work on the Crane Paper rebrand.

For Crane, it became about carrying forward something important from the past while changing, re-shaping it, or adding something unexpected to make it fresh and newly meaningful. Brian also offered some great advice about how to look for ideas. He said, “Look way behind you or way ahead. Do not look beside you.” This is an essential key to the success of so much of their design and identity work.