It’s happened again. I woke up to a notification from my bank app. Due to an automatic domain renewal, I have just paid 50 dollars—a sum I would much rather spend on dinner, mind you—to GoDaddy. A very reasonable investment, granting me another 12 thrilling months of exclusive rights to iloveyourmother.com or something of that sort, which I mentally abandoned months ago.

For those of you who do not realize the heavenly delights of owning a domain, let me explain. For as little as 5 dollars, you can go online, visit GoDaddy, Google Domains, or whatever else, and spend a lovely Saturday afternoon lurking in the sea of “.coms” and “.xyzs,” hoping to find that one, unique, witty, quirky address for your next big online venture. Once you have found your one and only, your Mona Lisa of domains, being the industrious designer that you are, you open Webflow, Framer, Adobe Portfolio, or WordPress, and in under 30 minutes, you have yourself a website. Sprinkle it with some juicy typography, maybe some quick-and-dirty interactions, throw in some overblown emojis, gradients, or whatever is cool at the moment, do a quick check for a suitable Instagram handle, and voilà, you have just become the proud owner of a brand.

I am sure I’m not the only one guilty of this. The internet is infested with lots of half-assed, abandoned brands that were conceived in potentially alcohol-induced, overly enthusiastic surges of inspiration. Instagram pages that posted for the last time in 2022—slogan, logo, and all. Up-and-coming fashion brands, innovative but never-realized Kickstarter products, thought-provoking digital mood boards, critics of all sorts. Original photography sourced from Unsplash. I am not trying to avoid scrutiny here—this lovely publication, a designer’s memoir as I like to think of it in my private moments, is yet another one of them.

The urge to own a brand has become an inherent, natural instinct in the 21st century. What to my grandmother is an outlandishly alien idea has become second nature to kids of the 2010s. I am pretty sure Gen Z doesn’t draw a line between a brand and a personality. It’s an obvious and pretty old cliché at this stage that “we are not showing our true selves online.” This conversation is long gone. It was the subject of the Millennial identity crisis when everybody assumed Mumford and Sons had achieved the holy grail of being authentic and public at the same time. I think as a society we have matured past having those dilemmas. Now we know: everything is a brand.

Ok, that’s all good and well—some might even say positive. A bunch of kids producing a bunch of digital debris due to their delusions of grandeur. No biggie. Creative, even. Entrepreneurial. The thing is, this is not just a hobbyist subject, and designers not knowing how to decompress after work, essentially doing more work after hours but for themselves with no apparent objective. Everybody—and I mean everybody—thinks in terms of a brand now. People start new businesses with nothing but a brand. No product, no value proposition, no pipeline, no supply chain, no lead acquisition channels. Logo, messaging, website, and some social media graphics templates. Good to go.

Let me tell you a little story about a client I once had. Let’s call him Bart for the purposes of this article. That was several years ago, when I really didn’t know better. Out of the blue comes this guy in desperate need of a top-notch brand—name, mission, visual identity, and all—who woke up on a Monday and decided to start a modeling agency. An important point to note here: he was a solar panel salesman on the daily. I mean, at that point, I should have already known this smelled fishy, but hey, I was a college kid, this was a full branding project, and my man Bart accepted what I then considered an outrageously high quote. Now I know it didn’t even cover expenses. Anyway, we got going.

Bart was more of an artist when it came to business—he painted in very, very broad strokes. His thing was, he was a social animal; he loved mingling, networking, and partying. He was not your archetype of a distinguished gentleman, however—more the type who, after a few drinks, starts giving you all he has on business models that supposedly “can’t fail” and how “nobody has ever tried them.” A man with a vision.

I only came to realize his hidden motives after a while. What he envisioned was an agency for models and influencers that would provide a platform for them to attend events, meet influential people, fly places, do things—just, you know, be out there. There would be a tier system, points, and ranks, but he failed to conceptualize a structure for compensation—like salaries, expenses, profits, that kind of stuff. He also had a pretty vague idea about where these models would be going, who the influential people they’d meet would be, and, most importantly, why. He was a skilled speaker though (not everyone can sell solar panels, you know), so it didn’t sound half as bad. What I understood after the project was realized—and immediately failed to get off the ground—was that he just wanted to be the center of attention of lots of beautiful women, for no fucking reason at all, and most certainly to take full advantage of this situation.

We spent months—months—talking about messaging, building mood boards, analyzing industry leaders, and discussing which shade of beige best encompassed the natural yet elevated feel we were going for. He had hundreds of inspirational materials saved on his phone, and would of course forward them to me at 11 PM on a Saturday via WhatsApp. Now that I think of it, he was a cheaper, dumber version of Andrew Tate, with similar motives and aspirations, and I do feel deeply ashamed of even considering taking part in this. Despite all that, I was hyper-enthusiastic, had blinders on, snugly sparing me the bigger picture. I tried to do everything by the book, invested a ton of time and passion, and produced what I still think is one of my better works when it comes to graphic design and naming. Needless to say, the closest this “innovative” venture got to being real was on mockups in my portfolio.

I learned that year that it’s not really about having clients. It’s about having clients who, at least in general, align with you ethically and have a real idea for a real business that creates real value—not a half-assed delusion with no real-world application. Otherwise, you might get caught up in a situation where your talent, passion, and creativity are wasted on nothing but flattering someone’s inflated ego, and all you’ll end up with is just a brand.