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This week I dove headfirst into branding. And honestly? It's one of those things that sounds simple until you actually try to do it. Logos, colors, names—everyone needs help with branding at some point, whether it's for a personal brand, a side project, or a full-blown company. It's one of those tasks that feels deceptively hard because the bar for "good enough" is invisible.

So I figured: what better way to kick off the new year than by rebranding Beyond Brief (the newsletter you're reading right now)?

I'll walk you through my entire process—what worked, what didn't, and what I learned along the way. And at the end, I want your honest opinion: did I pick the right one?

I started by telling Gemini to "make me 10 different options and a new color." Classic mistake. The prompt was too vague, and the results reflected that. I got a bunch of generic options that didn't really capture anything specific about the newsletter.

Lesson learned: AI image generators are only as good as your direction. "Make me something cool" gets you something mediocre.

This is where things got interesting. Instead of describing what I wanted, I described who I wanted to design it. I told Gemini:

"Let's make another grid, but this time I want options as if you were a designer at Apple, one from Substack, and one college grad designer."

This is a prompting trick I use constantly: giving the AI a persona to work from rather than technical specifications. It forces the model to think about design philosophy, not just aesthetics. The Apple-style option was clean but maybe too minimal. The Substack one felt familiar (almost too familiar). The college grad option had energy but lacked polish.

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Still not sold, I pushed further. This time I wanted to see how different design eras would interpret the brand:

"Let's try 3 more versions. One from a 70's designer that still works today with that influence, one from a designer that worked in the 80's, and one designer that won awards the last few years."

Interesting results, but nothing that made me say "that's it." The 70s influence felt too retro for a tech newsletter. The 80s version was busy. The award-winner felt like it was trying too hard.

Sometimes the best move is to scrap your approach entirely.

I changed tactics completely. Instead of describing styles or personas, I gave a hard constraint: yellow background with black text.

Now we were cooking. There's something about limiting your options that actually opens up creativity. Yellow and black is bold, instantly recognizable, and stands out in a sea of minimalist blue-and-white tech brands.

After a few more iterations, I landed on this—the new brand guide and logo for The Beyond Brief:

Here's the part nobody talks about: getting usable files out of AI image generators is a pain. I kept asking for all the logo variations—transparent backgrounds, different sizes, icon-only versions. It took way longer than it should have, but eventually I got everything I needed.

A few takeaways from this whole experiment:

Vague prompts get vague results. "Make me a logo" is a terrible prompt. The more specific you are—about style, constraints, or the persona doing the design—the better your output.

Personas beat specifications. Telling AI to "design like an Apple designer" communicates more than a paragraph of technical requirements ever could.

Constraints unlock creativity. When I stopped trying to describe the perfect logo and just said "yellow and black," everything clicked.

Iteration is the game. This wasn't a one-prompt process. It took multiple rounds of refinement, and that's normal. The first output is rarely the final one.

Exporting is still clunky. AI can generate amazing images, but getting production-ready files takes extra work. Plan for it.

Overall, it worked. It was actually kind of fun once I stopped expecting magic on the first try. Now I've got a fresh brand heading into 2025.

So—did I make the right call? Reply and let me know what you think of the new look.

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