Perhaps We Should Sweat the Small Stuff

There’s a moment in the 2019 documentary ‘10 Years With Hayao Miyazaki' that quietly reveals something we seem to be forgetting. It’s not dramatic. There’s no swelling score or grand declaration. Just an old man, late at night, dissatisfied.

For anyone somehow unfamiliar with Miyazaki (shame on you), he is the creative force behind Studio Ghibli and one of the godfathers of cinematic anime. Across the documentary’s four episodes, he cuts a very particular figure; a perpetually tense yet reflective elder craftsman, white apron on, cigarette always lit. Watching him wrestle with his own perfectionism while developing a feature-length animation is, in itself, compelling.

But one scene stands out. Amid a flurry of production reviews, Miyazaki pauses on a moment that, to everyone else, appears perfectly fine. “It won’t do” he says. It isn’t “charming” enough. So, despite having an army of animators at his disposal, he sits down and redraws it himself.

If you’ve never watched hand animators work, it’s pure magic. The way they conjure pace, weight and tension frame by frame. The flicking back and forth of paper, coaxing the eye into believing in a fluid motion. All from a handful of lines.

The scene is a simple embrace between two protagonists: a child and a child-sized fish (makes perfect sense in context). As it stands, it’s tender and clear. It would pass quality control in almost any production house. It tells the story. But it doesn’t yet feel right. Miyazaki redraws strands of hair, so they curl more tightly as the hug deepens. He adds creases to clothing, nudges the corners of a smile. Small, almost invisible gestures. When he’s finished, the scene becomes something else entirely. Indescribably charming. You feel it, even if you can’t quite articulate why.

But of course, you can articulate why. It’s the accumulation of subtle creative decisions. The implicit visual language at work beneath the surface narrative. All the things happening below what we are literally being shown, speaking directly to our emotional instincts rather than our rational minds.

So, what’s the lesson here? Probably not Miyazaki’s near-masochistic commitment to perfection at the expense of personal relationships. But certainly, his intent on creating work that connects with his audience – a full sensory experience, where you not only see, but feel the work. Those details connect differently. They bypass efficiency, logic and optimisation, and instead lodge somewhere deeper. In an age obsessed with performance metrics, efficiency and speed, it’s these subtle codes that often make the real difference.

I say this from experience. The deeper I’ve gone into developing and designing brand worlds, the more I’ve borrowed from other storytelling disciplines to guide me. The complexity of where brands now need to exist means the old reliance on verbal messaging and heavy-handed badging and branding is often impossible, or actively counterproductive. Recent findings from System1 suggest viewers switch off the moment a logo appears in the first frame on TikTok. Anything too overtly “ad-y” now creates instant distance.

Brands, then, need a broader vocabulary when it comes to their expressive language. The solution? More nuanced identity components that allow them to dial intensity up or down while retaining a distinct emotional register. Components which translate to a body language and codes of expression that communicate on a different level. Traditional logos give way to a brand signature code. Allowing brands to think about their broader ‘signoff’ behaviour and how it can be experienced differently in different occasions, rather than a static logo. And those codes will range from category to category. A fragrance brand might build its world around a signature scent. A toilet manufacturer, less so.

While these implicit codes should vary, they must always be rooted in the brand’s own, singular story. When developing Asda’s brand world, this took the form of a bold graphic narrative, one that emerged directly from, and amplified, its modern heritage. You could see echoes of market signage threaded throughout the bright, confident identity. By contrast, when we developed the brand world for Asahi Super Dry, it was essential to retain the understated restraint of modern Japanese culture. Here, we used carefully judged red highlights across all touchpoints, referencing not only the brand’s logo but also a distinctly Japanese approach to heroic minimalism. These are just fragments of much richer brand worlds, but they offer a sense of how distinctiveness and consistency can be achieved in many different ways, just by going a little deeper.

And really, it's as much about how you make something as what you make. Apple’s recent all-analogue Apple TV logo is a case in point. A company long associated with human creativity and technical innovation chose to create something tactile, obsessive in its attention to craft.

Viewers might not understand the techniques or terms behind the craft - but they’ll feel it. *Several studies have found that consumers subconsciously recognise, and value the effort and craft behind a brand’s visual appearance. More than that, high quality and well-crafted design positively correlate with stronger consumer-brand relationships, increased trust, and higher perceived brand equity.

Of course, not everyone has Apple’s budget or the production clout of a cinematic giant. But the principle still holds. The more care invested in translating big ideas into the subtle, often overlooked facets of a brand, the more authentic and consistent it will feel, and in turn, the more consumers will feel connected and loyal to the brand.

So next time you’re at your desk, apron on, cigarette in hand, metaphorical or otherwise, and you find yourself saying, “それはダメだ”. Go a little deeper. The charm is always in the details.