In THE ECHO, Erik Herrström makes a case against Pinterest-led design

The Brand Identity: THE ECHO is Erik Herrström’s debut book, a 218-page paperback that lays out a three-phase framework for building brands that shape culture rather than chase it. Across Immerse, Create and Impact, it covers the work that happens before any visual decision is made, the move from insight to identity, and what it takes for a brand to register in the world it enters.

Herrström, Founder & Creative Director at STUDIO HERRSTRÖM, draws on more than 20 years of building brands across music, lifestyle and technology, his time as Brand Design Director at Spotify, alongside contributions from 18 leaders working at MTV, Marshall, Boiler Room, Universal Music, Nothing, Crush Music and elsewhere. Designers, Herrström argues, have been starting projects on curated reference platforms like Pinterest, Are.na, Savee and Cosmos, which means thousands of people are circling the same images at the same time. The work that comes out of that loop looks competent and on-brief, but with no reason to be remembered.

He calls it “aesthetic alignment,” and the book is structured to give designers a way out of it. THE ECHO went through three structural rewrites across 15 months of evenings and weekends, with chapters added, removed and reordered as the manuscript took shape. “I underestimated the project,” Herrström admits. “The book evolved so much from what I had in mind initially. I added chapters, deleted them again, briefed the illustrator on ideas that I later decided not to use, and changed the entire structure of the book at least three times.” His argument cuts against the speed of the new tools that are so accessible and fast.

Anyone can now generate a polished brand world in minutes, but the book pushes designers back towards groundwork: asking clients which cultural tension they are responding to, what their non-consensus belief about their category is, who would actually care if their brand disappeared tomorrow. Research should start nowhere near inspiration platforms and move through Reddit, Substacks, Discord servers, interviews with cultural front figures and type treatments studied through Google Street View. The Immerse phase the book opens with is built on that thinking.

One of its clearest illustrations comes from Fabiana Pacini, who was Head of Global Marketing at Boiler Room at the time of the interview. “I call people on the ground, and I just eat their ear for two hours, so I can figure out which venues we need to be in, which artists we want to talk about,” Pacini tells Herrström. For the Boiler Room x Ballantine’s True Music show in Luanda, the capital of Angola, her team learned through local fixers that Instagram wasn’t the route and ran ads on the radio and in shopping centres instead, with someone driving around the city on a scooter handing out printed tickets.

A second perspective Herrström keeps returning to comes from Jonathan Daniel, founder of management company Crush Music, who works with Miley Cyrus and Green Day. Daniel often cites a teaching from the Chinese philosopher Laozi: direction over speed. Keep moving the way you mean to go, and you will get there; take shortcuts, and you may never arrive. Herrström’s own path into this way of thinking started early. The first website he built with his dad, around the age of 12, set a vibrant blue background behind a picture of a car, a random GIF and the line ‘Hi, I'm Erik.

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The article discusses a significant shift in design philosophy that challenges established norms, making it highly relevant and impactful for brand strategy professionals.