When to Change Your Identity and When to Leave It

At some point you will want to change everything. Sometimes that instinct is right. More often it arrives long before the identity has done its work. This step helps you tell the two apart.

Photo: “Close wooden electric guitar” by Markus Spiske, CC0.

You get tired first

You see your own colors, photos and covers every day. A listener sees them for a few seconds, now and then. By the time you are bored, most people are only beginning to recognize you.

Changing at that moment throws away exactly what you were building. A good rule: when you feel like changing, wait one full release cycle and ask again.

Good reasons to change

• The music changed in a way people can hear. A new direction deserves a look that matches it. We wrote about the opposite problem in Your Music Moved On. Your Photos Didn’t.
• The project changed. New members, a new name, solo instead of band.
• Something does not work in practice. A wordmark nobody can read small, a palette with no contrast, photos that no longer look like you.
• A new chapter begins. An album or an era with its own world.

Weak reasons

• You are bored
• Another artist launched something you admire
• A trend is everywhere this month
• One post performed badly

Change the identity when the music or the project changes. Being bored of it usually means it has started to work.

Evolve in layers

An identity has slow layers and fast layers.

Slow: your name, the wordmark, your three words. These hold for years.

Medium: typefaces, the core palette, the general photo style. Adjust them carefully, one at a time.

Fast: the color pair of a release, the photos, textures, the theme of a cover series. These can change with every release, as in step 19.

Most of the time, the freshness you want lives in the fast layer. A new release with new photos and a new color pair feels new without confusing anyone, because the slow layers held.

If you do change, do it all at once

A real change should happen on one day, across every surface from your map in step 2. Half-changed identities, with new covers and an old banner, look abandoned.

Update the style guide first, then profiles, then templates, then announce it with the first piece of new work. Keep the old files in an archive folder.

Do this now

Write down the last time you changed something visual and why. Then sort your current elements into slow, medium and fast.

If you are unsure whether to evolve or keep your identity, that is a conversation we have with artists often.